HANSARD
Printed and Published by Nova Scotia Hansard Reporting Services
Mr. John MacDonell (Chairman)
Hon. Barry Barnet
Hon. Karen Casey
Mr. Patrick Dunn
Mr. Sterling Belliveau
Mr. Clarrie MacKinnon
Mr. Wayne Gaudet
Mr. Leo Glavine
Mr. Harold Theriault
[Hon. Barry Barnet was replaced by Hon. Christopher d'Entremont
In Attendance:
Ms. Rhonda Neatt
Legislative Committee Clerk
Department of Natural Resources
Mr. Peter Underwood, Deputy Minister
Ms. Gina Penny, Provincial Entomologist
Mr. Walter Fanning, Manager, Forest Protection
Mr. Peter MacQuarrie, Director of Program Development
Mr. Jorg Beyeler, Director of Forestry
Canadian Food Inspection Agency
Mr. Greg Cunningham
Roman">[Page 1]
HALIFAX, TUESDAY, MARCH 27, 2007
STANDING COMMITTEE ON RESOURCES
9:00 A.M.
CHAIRMAN
Mr. John MacDonell
MR. CHAIRMAN: Welcome, I'd like to call the meeting to order. The usual format is that we introduce members of the committee. I will start with the member for Shelburne and then we will give the floor to you.
[The committee members introduced themselves.]
MR. CHAIRMAN: The floor is yours.
MR. PETER UNDERWOOD: MLAs, we are pleased to be here. We have a team here from the Department of Natural Resources, and it is a team because this is a complex issue and it has required a lot of teamwork from a lot of different people.
With me today to make a brief presentation and then hopefully be able to answer any questions you might have is myself, I am Peter Underwood, the Deputy Minister of the Department of Natural Resources; Walter Fanning, who is our Manager of the Forest Protection Division of DNR - Walter is on my far left; Gina Penny, who is our Provincial Entomologist, probably the real expert here about the bug itself - and I am sure you will learn lots about this nasty little creature from Gina; Peter MacQuarrie, who is the Director of our Program Development Division at DNR; on my right, Jorg Beyeler is the Director of our Forestry Division, although Jorge doesn't deal directly with the bug, he deals with the trees that the bug affects - so if you have questions about the bug and its impact on forestry, Jorg is here in case you have those; and also I am pleased to say we have Greg Cunningham, down in the back - Greg is the lead specialist of forest pest emergencies with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, which is one of our key partners in trying to deal with this infestation.
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I am going to turn it over to the team to give you a presentation. I believe you have a deck in front of you that you can follow along - it is probably not as pretty as it would be if it was in colour - and all the maps. That's one thing about DNR, they are just great at producing wonderful materials, but we can make due in black and white and Gina will provide the colour.
MR. WALTER FANNING: The presentation that you have there, we will slowly go through that so you can see some of the pictures. One thing I handed out that was produced yesterday is at least a colour version of the general infested area, and we will be referring to that throughout the meeting. Basically, I am just going to speak to a few slides, and the bulk of it, as Mr. Underwood indicated, will be with Gina about the insect itself, and we will finish off with some of the roles going on and the stakeholder plan that is currently in negotiation between a number of agencies obviously including ourselves and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
The background slide on the second page, just quickly to let you know, the damage was first spotted, it was unknown what it was, but in September 1999 the Canadian Forestry Service, being in Point Pleasant Park, noticed a large number of trees that were becoming red and dying. At that point it was started to be investigated by the Canadian Forest Service and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. It was identified as the brown spruce longhorn beetle. It's the first known introduction of this beetle in North America.
In March 2000, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency set out to establish, again, a first-ever multi-task force. It was called the Brown Spruce Longhorn Beetle Task Force where they brought in partners from many different agencies, academia, private and other organizations concerned with what was happening with this beetle in Point Pleasant Park, and we know some of those results. I think it's good to say that it was set out as a pilot, it was used as a model, I think in Ontario when they had other invasive species come into that province.
[9:15 a.m.]
In October 2000, it was the first establishment of the ministerial order and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency do that as part of their regulatory process with an invasive species. In the slide on the bottom, you can see that area. Now it comes out better if you look at the colour version. The grey area in that colour map that was provided is that ministerial order where the control of movement of any wood products that are considered to be infected would come out. That's a little bit better understanding of that and what it covers.
With that, I think I'll turn it over to Gina and she'll get in more of the beetle itself.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Can I interrupt before you start? There are two committees going on concurrently so some of the members are trying to be in two places at once. Because the House is sitting, we could only meet in the mornings, so I think there may be some
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movement of people coming here from the other committee if they can break away so if that happens, you'll know what's happening, and I apologize for interrupting.
MS. GINA PENNY: Thank you. I'm actually going to pass around a sample of the brown spruce longhorn beetle so you can get a feel for what we're dealing with. The male is on the left and the female is on the right.
As you'll be able to see from the sample that's going around, the brown spruce longhorn beetle is a small, flat, and dark brown to black beetle. It's about 8 to 18 millimetres long. It has a head and neck that's dark brown to black and it has a light brown band across the top of its wing covers, or what would approximate the shoulders on the beetle. Its antennae are about half the length of the body and they're red to brown in colour. The way you can distinguish the brown spruce longhorn beetle from other native Tetropium species, or other native beetles that look similar, are by the presence of coarse, tiny, tooth-like projections that are on the thorax of the body, or the area just behind the head.
When you look at the bottom slide that covers the life cycle of the brown spruce longhorn beetle, the adults emerge in late Spring and early summer and then mate and lay their eggs under bark crevices or cracks, so these eggs are hidden under the bark of the tree. Then these eggs hatch in a larvae in about 10 days to two weeks. They'll over-winter in tunnels in the wood. In Spring, these larvae will pupate, or enter their resting stage, and after approximately two weeks, the adults will begin to emerge. So, that's the life cycle of that beetle.
When you're looking for brown spruce longhorn beetle damage what you'll initially see is a yellowing of the foliage or needle loss in the crown or the upper portions of the tree. After the tree is killed, the remaining foliage will turn reddish-brown. One of the other key things to look for on the outside of the tree is that trees that are attacked by brown spruce longhorn beetles will exude massive amounts of resin, so there will be this sticky, white sap running down the entire length of the tree. Those are indicators on the outside of the tree.
If you were to look inside the tree you would find networks of feeding galleries because these larvae feed inside the tree and they burrow through, so they make networks of feeding galleries that are about six millimetres wide and then filled with beetle excrement and wood fibres. In these tunnels you may also find an associated fungus that moves along with the beetles called Ophiostoma tetropii. It's just a wood-staining fungus and this will leave dark areas inside the tunnels. I actually have an example of a piece of wood here that has the pupal chamber, and you can see the dark area where the associated fungus is in the tree. On the outside of the tree you'll also be able to see exit holes where the adults will emerge out back onto the trunk of the tree. These emergence holes tend to be round and oval in shape and about four millimetres in diameter.
The top map that you're seeing shows basically the trapping situation that we have in conjunction with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. The small circles around the
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ministerial order area showed trapping that has occurred, or will occur, by the CFIA and then the larger black circles indicate traps that are put out by the Nova Scotia Department of Natural Resources for 2006. So you can see how we've covered the province, trapping for the brown spruce longhorn beetle.
The map below, which I also believe you have a colour copy of, shows our positive trap sites for brown spruce longhorn beetle. You have red triangles and squares, those are all new positive sites for the brown spruce longhorn beetle, and the black dots represent positive sites for the brown spruce longhorn beetle from 2000 through to 2005.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Did you say where that remotest red square is in the upper right there, where that would be located?
MS. PENNY: The one furthest out is at Sheet Harbour.
MR. FANNING: Way out, 90 kilometres from Point Pleasant Park.
MS. PENNY: So we're basically trying to double our trapping effort from 2006. What we're going to do, in conjunction again with the CFIA, is where we had 175 traps in 2006 for the brown spruce longhorn beetle, we're going to try and double that amount to 350 traps this year. So what we're also going to do, in conjunction with doubling the number of traps, is try and fill in any gaps we've had in our trapping scheme, especially down on the eastern portions of Halifax County.
MR. FANNING: On that last slide on Page 6, why is this a concern? I mentioned earlier, this is the first known introduction of the BSLB in North America, so how a new pest comes in, how it reacts to trees, how fast it moves, all becomes an unknown. This has existed in Europe for quite some time, it is native over there. There has been a great amount of activity and research going on and it still has to go on, but that concern has to be what it does in not only killing trees, but what it does to our trees and how we transport them, how we transport products, all sorts of stuff like this.
In the example of Point Pleasant Park, within that first year we found upwards of 3,000 trees that were dead and dying from the beetle. Now one of the things about that is that although it was identified properly in the late fall of 1999, they did go back into the records of the Nova Scotia Museum and found that they did find this insect 10 years earlier, in 1990, but it was identified as the local beetle, the tetropium cinnamopterum. it is a native, you can't tell the difference between this and the native with the naked eye. Those tiny things that Gina mentioned identifying earlier has to be done by someone trained to do it and you have to do it under a microscope. So they did find it 10 years earlier, it is just that it took that time before the damage started occurring, but because it was just discovered then, it is still considered an invasive species and it is under the legislation of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency to take that action and we're very pleased that they did, and continue to, do that.
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It came in, apparently attacking healthy, red spruce trees. As we learn more, we're finding that there's a definition, some leniency maybe in what's healthy. Some claim that a lot of our red spruce in the Acadian Zone, in P.E.I. and New Brunswick and Nova Scotia are under some kind of stress anyhow, so that might make them susceptible to it. We find it in all spruces, not just our red spruce.
At the very first, the CFIA did a risk assessment, they rated it as high. Currently the new draft says it is a medium. There is some discussion going on with that, some feel it still should be high but right now it is proposed as a medium just because it is not as rapid a spread as we might see from other invasives that can go maybe kilometres a year. We just don't know yet how fast this thing moves.
Again, what does provide even the medium rating and higher is that there is spruce all across Canada and the U.S. as well, so how far it goes and its impact is of a concern. That's why we're involved with it.
The next page, at the top of Page 7, the research is critical for this. Good science doesn't some easy, it takes time to understand. The fact that we found, last year, 18 sites where we found beetles, we don't know exactly if this means that they always have been there or whether or not they've moved out, whether or not the testing and monitoring systems that they are using are now getting better to attract the beetles. So for that reason, the research still becomes very critical for us and the bulk of that is chaired by the Canadian Forestry Association out of Fredericton. Gina sits on that Science Subcommittee of the Task Force and there are a lot of people involved from all the agencies and we're still looking for that.
In that slide, it goes over some of the things we're still trying to learn. It says on the bottom if we have pheromone-based methods of surveying. What we're talking about with pheremones is they attract either the males or the females used to find one another, but doing that and getting down to the science, which becomes very specific, we can identify that, isolate it, and use it, to try to identify the beetle. So the scientists are really moving along quite well in being able to give us those tools to manage this thing because without it, it makes it very difficult to find it.
The bottom slide is the role, very briefly, of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. They have the legislative authority for invasive alien species. That's not with the department or the province. They're heavily involved with the funds and the conduction of all activities to eradicate the insect. Then it moves into control and management and later on, after a while, as it becomes more of a native species you see some of that change where the province will come in and be more involved than the Canadian Agency, but they have been heavily involved over the last six years with us and continue to do so and we're very pleased with that.
They coordinate the multi-agency efforts and they also enforce compliance. We've heard questions and comments of that in the media, as you can't move product outside of that
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regulated zone without some kind of compliance with what has to be done, either kill the beetle to eliminating a risk that you are going to transfer that out and speed up the spread of the beetle elsewhere.
The top of Page 8 is only a draft and I will say that, for not only our sake and for Greg's, that whether or not there will be an expanded ministerial order is still under negotiation with industry, ourselves and CFIA. That was one of the options on the table is what to do to look at these 18 other insect finds that are out there. So that just gives you an area. Not only can you see from the coloured map, but also, this is the area that we're looking at and how to intensify that survey that Gina referred to.
What does DNR do? We provide industry and land owner assistance. In Shubenacadie we have the integrated pest management within forest protection. Gina's our lead provincial entomologist. We provide that expertise in the professional and technical level to help industry deal with it, to help landowners deal with it. We're heavily involved with surveys and quality control. At one point, CFIA asked us to come in to do quality control on their field crews. Not only can they do it, but we have that expertise to help. We assist with trapping province wide with a network of quite a few pest detection officers, we call them, in the regional offices. We participate in all task force committees and subcommittees and we work with industry - although the certification and how to operate inside the zone, or outside is with the CFIA, we assist the agencies in the industry with that, as well. Peter has been involved with some of that in the last few years.
Lastly, Page 9, what currently you may have seen or heard about in the media is a stakeholder plan. There are a lot of organizations involved with this. The fact that we've found 18 sites with beetles is a concern. We want to know what's going on, although we still have a great demand for science and research, a lot of these organizations have gotten together to try to devise a new way to try to manage this in the next little while to come with something that's workable for industry, something that's workable for landowners, as well as the regulatory responsibilities at CFIA, and our responsibilities, I guess, in DNR, to try to do the best we can under these circumstances.
Some of the partners are listed on the bottom slide to give you an idea. There's many signatories on that plan and at this point, the results of it are still under negotiation, but I think it's fair to say that most organizations have been pleased, to date, of how we're going to tackle it this year with increased research. Considerably more surveying to try to see if those 18 finds are just something that happened last year, or whether or not we're going to face more and I think we're pleased with the scientists being able to improve that surveying method. They're getting a great deal of confidence now that it's being able to attract those beetles.
I guess, other than that, it's essentially open for questions for any of us that you maybe have.
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MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Theriault.
MR. HAROLD THERIAULT: Thank you very much. Where did these beetles come from?
MS. PENNY: They were believed to have been brought in on packaging material, into the harbour. That packaging material originated from Europe, or Asia, but it basically came in on wood packaging material.
[9:30 a.m.]
MR. THERIAULT: So there are no predators here? Are there any predators for these bugs?
MS. PENNY: Not that we know of.
MR. THERIAULT: What is the predator in Europe for these bugs?
MS. PENNY: I'm not sure.
MR. THERIAULT: Maybe we could import some of them.
MR. FANNING: Some of those solutions we have kind of hoped for but like anything, it's difficult. They don't have red spruce in the same kind of forests in Europe as they do here so it is reacting differently. In Europe, it's a secondary pest. It rarely attacks healthy, living trees. Usually they have been stressed or injured in some way and it comes in as a secondary. Now we may find eventually here it will go to a secondary, who knows, but right now it is attacking these trees differently. It makes it more awkward to say, I know they are looking, there is a fungus that is there now, I believe, that they have found.
MS. PENNY: There is a fungus that they are using to test for the presence of and they are looking at seeing if there is any effect by some native parasatoids. I believe that is on the slide about research, but as of right now, there are no known predators or anything that feeds on BSLB here.
MR. FANNING: We found a bacteria but it kills the adult when it is going to die anyhow so it doesn't stop it from reproducing. So we are treating it a little differently because it is in a new environment in Canada. If we can find something that is natural, that would be wonderful, that would be an ultimate for us but it takes time to find that.
MR. THERIAULT: You talk about these traps you are laying out. Are these traps just to see if there are any bugs in that area or are these traps capable of reducing these bugs?
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MS. PENNY: The traps are used to see if they are out there. The traps may be, depending on the size of the population that is there, capable of trapping out a population but they are mainly there to detect for the presence of the BSLB in any given area.
MR. THERIAULT: But couldn't you set enough of these traps to annihilate them? You certainly can in the fishery. (Laughter)
MS. PENNY: The only problem there is with population levels. If the population levels are really high, then trying to trap out the population using a pheromone trap, you would basically have to just pollute the area with traps so it is not really an effective means for getting rid of a population, it is more to help you identify and then you can use some other controlled means after the beetle population has been identified there. It may be able to work as a trap in a small population if you only had a few beetles but once you get to larger levels, that's not a method that is going to work taking out a population.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Our equivalent to the fisheries clear-cutting? Take away their food supply?
MR. THERIAULT: Down in the Digby area, about seven years or eight years ago, a lot of our trees started dying, especially on the Digby Neck and islands area. It was mostly older trees. Years ago they used to harvest the wood down there, a generation ago, and there didn't seem to be any problem but now where the trees aren't being harvested in that area, these trees started dying. The forest down there is grey right now, a fire hazard, as a matter of fact. There is a bug of some sort that goes into these older trees and the younger trees coming up underneath are as healthy as can be and the bugs don't seem to bother them. What kind of bug is that down there that is attacking these older trees alone and not the younger ones?
MS. PENNY: Sounds like you may have spruce beetle. The native spruce beetle population, they tend to attack older trees and aren't as interested in younger trees so that may be what you have seen in your area where your older trees are being attacked by this native spruce beetle, whose populations are high, and then the younger trees aren't being affected.
MR. FANNING: From the other side of what we do in Shubie with fire, that's what some of our people have confirmed. We have gone down, because of the concern for fire in the Digby area. It is spruce beetle. That's a secondary insect. Again, the trees have to be older and not as healthy and it comes in, kind of to look after them and take them out. It is a big, big thing across the entire province in areas where we have had pasture land. White spruce came up after the farms have been abandoned so we literally have thousands of hectares of that type of material susceptible. Digby Neck and the area has really been affected. What we are finding and watching really closely now, and Gina is involved with this, we have a concern for Central Nova Scotia because of the Hurricane Juan damaged trees. We have large areas, although there has been a fair amount of material being salvaged and it has done
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extremely well, we still have trees down there which are going to be a breeding ground, in a sense, for the spruce beetle and we have to watch that for similar reasons.
But, just imagine, this is a beetle and what makes our job so difficult is that it's inside the tree. For that short time the adult flies, it spends most of its life under the bark. So, getting at it and studying it, trying to know how to manage it becomes very difficult. That's the same way with the spruce beetle down there. It's under the bark.
MR. THERIAULT: So these normal beetles that we have, do they have a predator? Woodpeckers, I suppose.
MS. PENNY: Perhaps for the larvae, but I don't think there's a known predator for spruce beetle, the native spruce beetle.
MR. FANNING: Some of these as natives are in their population all the time, but when you get an older group of trees in the sense of white spruce, they're more readily susceptible to some kind of damage, in the case of spruce beetle, we're seeing that more and more - places like Antigonish and other areas, they are very highly affected.
MR. THERIAULT: So you don't believe that you could set traps enough to stop it? It wouldn't be possible? I mean, you catch some with some traps, why couldn't you catch a lot with a lot of traps?
MS. PENNY: I think the level of traps you would have to put out to catch all the beetles of a population, would just, one, not be cost or time effective. I think they're best used as an indicator rather than a means of controlling a population.
MR. FANNING: Another option, possibly, you mentioned earlier about doing, trapping is one option. Another one that I mentioned, the pheromones, what the male or the female use. In this case, I think it's the male that uses the pheromones to attract the female. One possible option, if you perfect that enough, is that you can saturate an area so that they're confused. So, it kind of reduces the population because they no longer can find the males. That may cause other issues, mind you, too, but there are possibilities there that I think in science we have to be very aware of.
Maybe in small populations, maybe it's an option to do massive trapping, but when we're looking at a large forest area, there's obviously difficulties involved with being able to do some of those. We don't want to throw anything out yet, but some of them are obviously considerably more difficult to do.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Dunn.
MR. PATRICK DUNN: You mentioned this beetle came from Europe. Any particular part of Europe?
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MR. FANNING: Poland, some of the scientists there that are helping the Canadian scientists are from Poland, but I think it exists in most of Europe where they have some Norway spruce. I don't know if Greg has an addition to that or not. It's a good question and I'm not 100 per cent sure.
MR. DUNN: I was wondering if the population is in any particular part of Europe. I read where the beetle will attack hardwood, but is there preferred softwood?
MR. FANNING: Only spruce, no pines, no hardwoods.
MR. DUNN: So it stays away from the hardwood.
MR. FANNING: Yes.
MR. DUNN: That's interesting. You keep talking about traps. Could you describe the trap?
MS. PENNY: The trap is basically a large, my understanding is, it's a large set-up of what looks like funnels strung between two trees and it has the pheromones for the beetle contained within it. So the beetles are trapped in this massive funnel system.We don't have a picture of one.
MR. FANNING: You try to simulate a dark tree trunk.
MS. PENNY: It's basically a simulation of a tree. Oh, Greg has one.
MR. DUNN: That would be very capable of trapping quite a few beetles, then, the size of those traps.
MR. FANNING: Yes, they had some really good results last year, they're starting to say, okay, we think we got this down now so we are able to attract more beetles in. They feel pretty good. That's why we were looking with the CFIA at other options to setting up and expanding the MO zone of trapping very extensively this year to either collect beetles, know exactly where they are, better delineate and get an idea of how many we can pull into these traps.
MR. DUNN: Another question I have is, dealing with our native beetle and this beetle that came over from Europe, are we advanced enough to know if there's any relationship going on with the native and the European beetle as far as counteracting or are they causing more of a problem - is there a mixture there, do they stay isolated?
MS. PENNY: I think we've been finding that there may be a mixture because I know in the trapping we're finding both species of the native tetropium species and the imported brown spruce longhorn beetle. So it seems like they tend to be in the same general areas.
[Page 11]
MR. DUNN: I guess my last question, well with regard to the population, is the population increasing rapidly?
MS. PENNY: It has sort of been a slow progression to date, I would say so.
MR. DUNN: We're looking at roughly, what, 17 or 18 years approximately?
MR. FANNING: Yes, if we use that example, that would maybe be considered slow moving. You see we don't know whether or not that 18 that is out there now, we don't know if they've moved out or they've been there. Just kind of at that point of saying with the better testing, with the better trapping, let's see this year whether or not you know. We may go out if we find next year that there are 150 sites, we don't want to find that, but if there are, then we know what's being established here and there'll be more serious negotiations within the CFIA ourselves and industry.
If we go out and we find that in these 18 sites we went out and we did something and we only come out and find 4 next year, okay, there's evidence that we can control and maybe move it back into the centre, the core where the MO is now. So we still are optimistic but we're still working on it.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you. Mr. Dunn. Before I go to Mr. d'Entremont, two members have arrived. So I just wonder if you would introduce yourselves to the panel, please.
MR. LEO GLAVINE: I am Leo Glavine, Kings West, trying to cover two meetings this morning.
MR. CLARRIE MACKINNON: I am Clarrie MacKinnon, Pictou East, also trying to cover two meetings.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. d'Entremont.
HON. CHRISTOPHER D'ENTREMONT: The first question I really have goes around moving projections. I know we have the 18 sites but from experience in Europe and where this beetle resides, where might they be moving and how are they moving? Is it under their own steam, are they hitching rides on something else?
MS. PENNY: Well I think part of the movement is slowly and through some of their own steam. Also they are moving if infested wood gets moved, they move in with that product, so those are basically the two pathways for their movement - either in infested wood products or other products or by flying under their own steam.
MR. FANNING: We don't know at this point if they're really strong flyers.
[Page 12]
MS. PENNY: Yes, that's the other thing.
MR. FANNING: We know that they've gone from Point Pleasant Park to McNabs Island so you know there is some distance there but we just don't know whether or not - maybe these 18 were involved with movement prior to the CFIA putting on that restriction. So again, we're not 100 per cent sure, but spruce pretty well exists anywhere there. There was some talk about whether or not Hurricane Juan damage was moving them north and northeast. There's huge white spruce down at St. Margarets Bay and other areas but we're not finding them down there.
MR. D'ENTREMONT: Sort of almost a wind pattern that they are sort of hitching a ride. Is there insecticide or some kind of spray that might be able to do it? Being respective of that, it is tunnelling, it is in bark and it is pretty hard for that to be effective.
MS. PENNY: Right now I think the one insecticide that's been found to work is Imidacloprid and that's basically injected into trees. It is cost prohibitive so it's used basically on really high-value trees. It is not something that you could inject into every tree in the forest, so that's basically where it stands for chemical control right now.
MR. D'ENTREMONT: My last question, Mr. Chairman, would be just what are the other influences to it? Cold weather, warm weather? Or we really haven't seen anything that seems to impact them a whole lot?
MS. PENNY: No, not really.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you. I want to go to Mr. MacKinnon but before I do that, Ms. Penny, could you send that piece of wood up, please? I'd like to have a look at that - just to let the minister know I wasn't going to use it as a weapon.
MS. PENNY: Okay, well that's the entrance hole right there and then they burrowed in and it has pupated . . .
MR. CHAIRMAN: This is a piece of white spruce?
MS. PENNY: I'm not sure.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. MacKinnon.
[9:45 a.m.]
MR. CLARRIE MACKINNON: Thank you very much. I am delighted to have this opportunity today with you folks. I have a letter here from Diana Blenkhorn, the President and CEO of the Maritime Lumber Bureau. The Department of Natural Resources has, in fact, endorsed and was involved in the plan by stakeholders to mitigate the risk and spread of the
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beetle. Correspondence was sent to Chuck Strahl and this was done some time ago, over a month ago. I haven't been talking to Diana recently but has anyone heard back in relationship to what the federal government is doing on this issue that is of such vital importance to Nova Scotia forests?
MR. FANNING: A lot has gone on since the development of the stakeholder plan. Unfortunately, I spoke to it just briefly here before you came in but that is moving on right now. I think it would be fair to say that this was taken very seriously by all the agencies involved and that have signed on and I think it is going to influence greatly what is going to be happening this particular season, if no longer, for activities. So that particular plan now, with all the signatories, I think they are quite pleased with what is moving. Negotiations haven't finished here to say that these are all the particular tasks that will go on but I think if you spoke to Diana, she would be quite pleased, I think, with the progress, as I think the CFIA would at this point.
MR. GREG CUNNINGHAM: I am Greg Cunningham with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. That letter, I believe, was written back around mid to late February by Diana Blenkhorn to Chuck Strahl, our Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. At this time, I think it is fair to say that Chuck Strahl, through the media and through other correspondence, has indicated that he will respect the process with the stakeholder consultations to allow that to develop, which it has. We have had subcommittee meetings of our task force, a task force meeting recently and basically moving toward decision in respect to the actual zone aspects under the ministerial order and also in respect to the overall way in which the pest is managed.
I think it is fair to say that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency minister has taken the stakeholder plan seriously and feels that there are a lot of good, positive elements in there. We definitely have to make sure the regulatory framework is something that will fit in with the plan, so that is the main, kind of, consideration right now. The final zone configuration is really what is on many of our minds, of course.
MR. MACKINNON: Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the comments made by Mr. Cunningham very much and I'm glad that the federal government, other than the Canadian Food Inspection Agency is taking this very seriously. While we have you at the mic, I'm wondering if there may be other areas, outside of Nova Scotia, that we may have the brown spruce longhorn beetle as well, in the State of Maine, for example, you know the large forests that are there, and what have you. I think, and I'm glad, that we are less laissez-faire than our American neighbours in relationship to many things, including mad cow and all kinds of other things that we have been involved in. Having said that, are we doing a better job of testing and better trapping and so on? Are there any possibilities that this beetle is elsewhere and not detected?
MR. CUNNINGHAM: Well, with the brown spruce longhorn beetle, it has been a progressive type of a survey effort, in particular. I'll go back a couple of years, even back to
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say, 2005. We increased our network of traps in 2005, so you look at the positives that we had last year. Those 18 new positives, basically we were covering the same ground the previous year and we had two positives, one around the Aerotech Industrial Park, one in Fall River. We had another positive in the Mineville area. Almost the same network, same type of trap as last year. Last year we had the development of 18 new positives. Almost in the same area. So that was kind of a progression. We upped the number of traps after we had the first onslaught of positives last summer. We increased the number of traps in New Brunswick. We've increased the number of traps in the Halifax metropolitan area and out as far as say, 65 kilometres, I guess.
This year, we have scientific development in this pheromone, the male pheromone. We'll be lacing all of our traps with that new, improved design, I guess, and increasing the number of traps in Nova Scotia. We have a plan that has a fairly intensive grid, within the metropolitan Halifax area. That moves out in a fairly systematic manner, but with higher coverage for all of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick - I have the exact figures here, actually. Nova Scotia would be 397 traps planned. New Brunswick, 141. I think that's up from 20-some odd. Newfoundland and Labrador, 31, Prince Edward Island, 32, Quebec, 40. In respect to the U.S., we've been going back and forth saying, hey, we've got a new trap development here with the pheromones and there's been exchange with the U.S. I can't tell you numbers, but I do know that the State of Maine, for example, the trapping will increase there. It's my understanding.
MR. MACKINNON: Mr. Chairman, a comment and a quick question. First of all, I want to commend the department and all of the other stakeholders who have been working on a plan very aggressively, and I think that is appreciated and I think, although there was concern about the Canadian Food Inspection Agency's stance initially, I believe that there has been a stepping up to the plate and certainly that is appreciated as well, but the quick question is in relationship to forest harvest, after an area has been hit or the beetle has been identified in an area, to the department, what kind of practices can be done to get that wood fast, with respect to inventory and so on? I'm not advocating massive harvests in Halifax and parts of Hants County, Colchester or whatever. What is the practice that can achieve a harvest of some of this wood, earlier on in the stage?
MR. FANNING: I'm not sure. Part of that is still part of the negotiations going on between the CFIA, industry and ourselves, just for that. Part of it had to do with, if you find the beetle - a landowner - in the middle of the province, you find a single beetle on the edge of a 400-hectare property, does that mean his whole property should be quarantined? That's what the fairness is of trying to decide how to do that because I don't think anybody involved wants to see the beetle find as a reason to be clear-cutting unnecessary amounts of material.
Yet at the same time, we want to be fair to the landowners that if there's property there that they can utilize, whether it be harvest, whether it be done in other ways, I know that's there to try to look at these outer areas right now that there's some means to be fair to everybody and not just go to cutting because right now and I think that's been part of - and
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I think I'm safe to say - the quarantined zone creates more restrictions and I think they, themselves, and that's why I think they've responded to that plan by industry saying, well, if it's there, what do we do to make it fair to maybe move wood and how much of it has to go. We don't know if one beetle is found, whether that represents, you know, you can go out and harvest just metres of area and that looks after that beetle find for now. So we're not quite sure. Anytime you're looking at a beetle, it is harvesting and processing that gets rid of it faster, but I don't think anybody wants to be going out and, you know.
MR. MACKINNON: I believe that humankinds' appetite should be looked after before the beetles' appetite. So that would be my last comment.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Well, we're just going to curb your appetite.
MR. MACKINNON: I didn't expect to get the last one in so thank you.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Glavine.
MR. LEO GLAVINE: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and certainly I welcome you here as well this morning. I wasn't here for the first part of the discussion but is it primarily your only red spruce that is under attack by the longhorn beetle or all spruce?
MR. FANNING: We don't find it as much in Norway spruce but it still can be there I guess, yes.
MS. PENNY: All spruce.
MR. FANNING: All spruce. When it first came in, red spruce is identified, as Gina mentioned earlier, it showed that resinosis, I guess you would call it?
MS. PENNY: Yes, the resinosis, or the weeping tree, the resin coming down.
MR. FANNING: It's so easy to tell that this tree was attacked. You don't find that as much in the white or the black spruce. You will find the exit holes and you'll find the damage but for some reason the red spruce was bleeding more than the other ones with this resin. All spruces are affected and noted in the risk assessment.
MR. GLAVINE: There seems to be certainly a different perception of what's happening here, or it is the reality, versus I guess the record of what has happened in Europe in terms of the attack. Is there some plausible explanation for that? I'm wondering what you had all heard.
MS. PENNY: I think the reason we're seeing the differences is, as was mentioned earlier, in Europe the brown spruce longhorn beetle is sort of a secondary pest. It comes in after the primary pest has attacked and done its damage on the tree where here the brown
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spruce longhorn beetle is attacking what seem to be apparently healthy spruce. So that may be where you're seeing the difference in effect.
MR. FANNING: It's hard to tell, too, with a new environment like it's here.
MS. PENNY: Right.
MR. FANNING: Someone asked before, are there predators and parasites. Maybe they'll come in time but right now it's sort of in a new environment where it doesn't have . . .
MS. PENNY: It has got almost free range right now. There's nothing putting on the brakes. There's no pressures putting on the brakes.
MR. GLAVINE: I mean I certainly understand, you know, why we have the quarantine zone, there's no question about that, but are there two schools of thought emerging here as to perhaps how it should be addressed as we go forward, with trying to get control and mitigate the impact that it's going to have? I'm just wondering if there are two schools of thinking about how we do this. I mean I think in retrospect the spruce budworm, after 25 to 30 years of flying over the forests with chemicals in New Brunswick, I think they had a different analysis after 25 years of what should have been done 20 years earlier. I'm just wondering, you know, what direction and if there is another school of thought and some counter-positions that do need consideration?
[10:00 a.m.]
MR. CUNNINGHAM: I could probably answer that question, if you don't mind.
MR. FANNING: Sure, if you want, and then I will . . .
MR. CUNNINGHAM: That has been a question that has been front and centre for us since the beginning, basically. We had a pest risk assessment that was carried out in 2000. It basically classified brown spruce longhorn beetle as a high risk to the forests of Canada and that looks at a number of different factors, how it might reproduce here, et cetera. That is something that has to be continually re-evaluated. It was re-evaluated in the Fall of 2005. It lowered their rating to a medium risk to Canada but even over this past number of months, you see a lot in the media but don't worry, we are asking those questions of the Canadian Forest Service and different scientific partners.
Those are questions that we are asking because this is not one of those glossy pests, like even our emerald ash borer in the ash trees of Ontario, you will be standing there and you will see them going over your shoulder. That is visceral, you can see it. Well this is not as dramatic of a pest in that regard but it is still in there and it is still a significant threat to the forests of Canada, the spruce forests, so we have to hang in there and that is why we are
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there from the regulatory standpoint. Yes, what the U.S. thinks of the pests, that matters. Of course, what we think matters. I'm sure my provincial counterparts will say the same.
So we are riding that line and that is reflected in our measures that we address for the movement of products, how big the zone is. You have to take all of that into consideration. It is not an easy decision on this pest because of those facts that it is not one that is way up there, it is one that is kind of in the medium range. It's a tough question.
MR. FANNING: If may add a few things in there, too.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Sure.
MR. FANNING: He mentioned schools of thought and what we are trying to do with a new insect, and as we are learning, is try to apply the best science available and that changes. Like if you go back two years ago, we had a trap that we might have been mildly happy with but last year the scientists became kind of excited that now we get something that we are starting to see beetles attracted to and get into traps. So it's not just an accidental clumsy flier that happened to fall in. So we will be able to say now, yes, it's working. So as that science improves and it gets better, we start changing that management, we have that flexibility to alter what we do so we can blend three schools of thought to attack it. That improves every year. There is still science.
Right now there are negotiations for another three years to five years of scientific work to try to find, you mentioned flying, Minister d'Entremont said, how fast does this thing move? This year they have flight mills to try to simulate how fast or where this beetle goes. If it has a tree in front of it, it is healthy, it may not care to go anywhere but if the food source isn't there, a breeding source, where does it go?
Secondly, that can be applied almost to any insect. Our New Brunswick counterparts have obviously made management decisions and we, as a department, have made management decisions in the past. As a department, with spruce budworm, we have only used a natural bacteria, BTK, on our budworm. That is all that has ever been used to date. We find that very effective. We find we can go in and use it in smaller, select areas, in higher value stands, and not have to go to broad base. We have a little different experience and I think we are pretty pleased and proud of that so we know when the spruce budworm comes back, and they are predicting in the next three years to six years it will start coming into the province again so we have to be ready but we have some tools to manage them. BSLB, we don't have all those tools yet. They are just beginning to emerge for us so it we are still evolving on how we want to manage it.
MR. GLAVINE: Just one last question there, in terms of getting the solid information out, especially in Nova Scotia where we have so many woodlot owners and we don't have a lot of Crown land where you can make certain decisions and presumptions about how you
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are going to do the management piece, how is that relation going and information getting out and co-operation from woodlot owners during this process?
MR. FANNING: I think it has been relatively good. I wouldn't say there are not areas of improvement. Some of the negative publicity and stuff that has come over the last while had to do with once you are inside a quarantine area and if it not large enough volumes to attract the contractor to come in to get it or compliance with the CFIA, with their responsibility of making sure it doesn't get outside further and then starting to affect more owners. I think it has been okay. It can be improved, again, in that stakeholder plan that Mr. MacKinnon mentioned. There is more means to involve, because it involves the Federation of Woodland Owners are heavily involved this time. There are other groups, the Association for Sustainable Forestry. They have even bigger education packages for landowners to get them involved to know what is happening here in the meantime. We are getting there. We are not there yet but we are getting there.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Bain.
MR. KEITH BAIN: Mr. Chairman, just a brief question. It is concerning the Cape Breton area. I noticed you had three test areas, or trap areas that are identified in your map on Page 5 and I am assuming that each one - the first two were on either side of the Cape Breton Highlands and I would say the other might be around the Mira area - the Marion Bridge-Mira area.
Because of the Highlands being so densely wooded, has there been no indication of encroachment in any of the testing results?
MS. PENNY: No, I haven't heard of any positive finds in that area or any movement into, as of yet.
MR. BAIN: They don't want to come across the Causeway. I just want to make sure I'm clear, I guess, that if there was indications of this in any of those three sites, that's when all of a sudden the dots start to become more prominent.
MS. PENNY: Yes.
MR. BAIN: They are spread out more, just to trace the whole thing?
MR. FANNING: Yes, actually for 2007 the survey plan will - yes.
MS. PENNY: It will include that area?
MR. FANNING: It will increase more uniformly within Cape Breton.
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MR. BAIN: Okay. I ask that question only because the Highlands is so densely wooded.
That's it for me, see how easily you got away with it? Thank you.
MR. CHAIRMAN: I guess it must have been that piece of wood I brought around to curb people.
Mr. Belliveau.
MR. STERLING BELLIVEAU: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Just a a two-part question. First of all, I think we all basically asked similar questions but I'm interested in talking about where the beetle actually came from in Europe and Asia. I'm just curious, how quick the beetle expanded in that area and can we project for Nova Scotia if we don't do something drastic?
MS. PENNY: I'm not sure how fast it spread within its native range. Do you know if there's any information on that? It is a secondary pest. You see this is the problem with it being a secondary pest in its native range, people aren't really paying that much attention to it so I don't have a rate of spread to give you throughout its native range.
MR. FANNING: That's something that could be asked of our science subcommittee, to see if that - you see I am not familiar with its history there, how long, how many years it has been in Europe. I do know that Dr. John Sweeney from Fredericton works with a gentleman in Poland and he is a specialist in Europe for it so I am sure he would be able to obtain that answer and see if we could try to get something on that one.
MR. BELLIVEAU: The second part is, to me, just my observation over the last 10 or 20 years, naturally in the forest area we've had more development, commercial developers moved in, residential use and I've also observed that we've had a lack of wind over the last 20 years, other than the exception of Hurricane Juan, and especially when we have heavy foliage, when the trees are in their full bloom. To me this basically - if we have this heavy development you are naturally going to have some stress on the root system of trees and we have a lack of clear-cutting, other than the commercial again, the commercial use of woodlots.
I guess the point I am trying to make is a lot of people 25 or 30 years ago used wood as a heating source, so we see a lack of that. I guess I'm just trying to summarize all those different events. Does that actually have an impact on our forests?
MR. FANNING: I'm not quite sure, to be honest. Any time we change what we do, obviously it does. What you're saying first, I guess I didn't understand what you said.
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MR. BELLIVEAU: I was making all the points. If you look at the area here, the 5 to 15 to 20-kilometre area and the points that I was making, that we have more development, we've had a lack of wind, we've had a lack of managing the forest and to me, all this here, we basically give this predator a perfect opportunity to come in and invade this particular scenario. I'm asking that as a question, do we create this situation for this beetle?
MR. FANNING: In movement - oh, I'm sorry, Peter.
MR. PETER MACQUARRIE: I'm not the expert here, I just surmise that in an urban fringe area people - the trees that they're going to want to conserve are going to probably tend to be the bigger, older trees because they're going to look more in character with their neighbourhood, good place to put a treehouse or whatever.
But, I think, yes, those trees are more to be at the end of their lives, they're going to be more susceptible to rots, pests of all kinds, as opposed to if you saved the thrifty, young trees. But, you can't see under thrifty, young trees. People like to get the branches up off the ground so they can see where the dog is and where the kids are. I think it would just be a bias to save a tree that's at the end of its life and more susceptible to attack.
MR. FANNING: In addition to that, too, is what makes Halifax susceptible, maybe Shelburne, Port Hawkesbury and others - they're ports. I know the CFIA are very vigilant on this, it's suspected that this insect came in on maybe green crating as an egg or a larvae, it comes into the port and then it jumped from the container port into Point Pleasant Park. I know they watch the ports consistently for this. So, it makes ports maybe more susceptible across Canada for any kind of invasive species that moves in this manner - as a beetle, anyhow.
MR. CUNNINGHAM: I think it's important to note for the brown spruce longhorn beetle that, when we were talking about the balance of the quarantine measures versus trade earlier on, in 1998, that was the first year in North America we imposed the wood packaging restriction for dunnage that's used to shore up heavy cargo and for the wood packaging itself. Prior to 1998, there were no restrictions because there was a huge kind of balance between the U.S., Canada and other trading partners as to, can we do that? Can we have a restriction on wood packaging? Wood packaging is used for a lot of cargo, as you know.
So, we imposed those restrictions with the U.S. hand-in-hand in 1998, so before that, we didn't have those restrictions. That's the period whn the brown spruce longhorn beetle came in. That's not to say that we won't have future incursions because the measures can't get everything, the measures can't be that restrictive that we don't have trade, obviously, but that's an important note. Those restrictions were not in place at the time that BSLB came to Halifax.
We don't know when that came in, either, 1990s, when we had specimens actually collected, we have no idea exactly when before that the beetle actually landed.
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MR. BELLIVEAU: I'm just curious about how this actually originated, but to me this was not just - if you can go back and pinpoint it in the time frame in the 1990s to Halifax Harbour, my question is, is that just confined to this particular harbour? There are other trading ports across Nova Scotia that these vessels have entered. Is that fair to say?
MR. CUNNINGHAM: That's very fair to say. If you look at U.S. records, Canadian records - we've intercepted this path many times. That's not to be taken out of context because that's the same for other species as well. Hopefully, they're not going beyond. In this case you had a port facility adjacent to a park - steak dinner. Maybe it stayed there for awhile.
MR. BELLIVEAU: That's the point I was trying to make, is, had we created this steak dinner effect? The point I'm trying to make here, if we accept these other ports were available in the 1990s, other than Halifax-Dartmouth, have we created the steak dinner?
MR. CUNNINGHAM: That's why - it's not unusual to have some forested area in some port areas. That's why every major port area in Canada, there is vigilance going on with trapping for a range of pests. It's like an early warning type of thing.
MR. CHAIRMAN: We've completed the first round, except for me. One comment I want to make is that you don't annihilate all the sheep just to prevent the problem with coyotes. The fact there was a steak dinner, we still like to have trees around our ports and in our cities. Well, I have a question that goes along the lines of the biology of the beetle, I guess. When we put out these traps, do we trap our own beetle? I mean are we catching the similar one that you need a magnifying glass?
MS. PENNY: Yes.
MR. CHAIRMAN: We are. So the pheromones are not necessarily species specific or are they?
MS. PENNY: It's not so perfected and so tweaked that it gets just the one brown spruce longhorn beetle, it gets its relative or its cousins.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Now, genetically, are the two species close enough genetically that they could mate and produce fertile offsprings?
MS. PENNY: Well, my thinking is since they're separate species, they shouldn't be able to.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Okay, they shouldn't be able?
MS. PENNY: No.
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MR. CHAIRMAN: But we don't know. If they did that, then we would say they weren't a separate species?
MS. PENNY: Right.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Well, I'm not really clear as to whether the rubber has hit the road yet on this. I know the USDA had people here a month ago or so. So I'm curious as to their reaction, or maybe they're going to file a report in six months or something and send it to us, but when we talk about all the other jurisdictions, traps in Quebec and traps in New Brunswick, traps in P.E.I., it would tend to make me think that whatever the Americans are thinking is going to set the tone for the day perhaps considering we export, you know, basically what we cut, we export. So if they are having a problem with this, then we've got a problem. So do we know, and I'll put this to Mr. Cunningham because I think you're probably the guy, the go-to guy on this one, do we know what the American reaction is? Is there a reaction yet?
MR. CUNNINGHAM: We haven't received a reaction or a response yet to the visit that they had there in the first of March, no, we haven't received a response as yet.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Can you divulge your conversations with them?
MR. CUNNINGHAM: Well, in respect to our discussions, there has been nothing that has come up that would indicate that the U.S. may be going to tell us what to do. I think they've taken the stance that, you know, Canada, you have a job to do and we have good faith in you, but I could never predict what the response might be.
MR. CHAIRMAN: I've been to Lawrencetown for several meetings on the quarantine zone in that area and I've got to say that I found, you know, CFIA to be pretty tough on their line of having their heels dug in on this. So I'm curious about any notion you might have as to where CFIA is in terms of this expanded area, potential expanded area, and what the potential is to try to manage this rather than put it in a quarantine zone. Can you speak to that?
MR. CUNNINGHAM: Other than to be general in saying that the stakeholder plan that we were presented with, I think it has been taken as a very positive document, a good framework from which to work on, but in respect to actually me saying what I feel the absolute zone will be, I think that it's fair to say that, you know, those same considerations I was discussing earlier in respect to making sure that, I forget what you said earlier, you know, the actual measure doesn't outweigh the risk.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Right.
MR. CUNNINGHAM: Those considerations are front and foremost at this time.
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MR. CHAIRMAN: Who will make the decision in regard to Diana Blenkhorn's letter to Minister Strahl?
MR. CUNNINGHAM: Actually Chuck Strahl will make the final decision because what this will translate to in regulatory terms will be a ministerial order revision and that will outline the absolute products that are to be regulated. I think right now the last revision was in July 2001 and that still included hardwood, for example, because the jury was still out on some of that. So in respect to the products, that will be redefined and the area would be redefined as well to reflect a new zone.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Just a couple of other questions. When you look at this map, it seems like the beetles are all heading one way. So I'm just curious if you have any kind of analysis of that, whether that's just the way the wind blows. It would seem to me that that would be kind of the direction that the hurricane might have taken them out of the park.
The other question I have is, 25 years ago, 30 years ago, I worked in the woods for three years cutting logs and pulp and I notice that in the winter quite often trees are frozen. So I'm curious as to, in the wood that far, why that larvae doesn't freeze, or if it freezes it seems to survive. So what do we know about - obviously it is surviving the Nova Scotia winters, so it would seem to me that that would be an advantage if colder temperatures should have some impact, do we know whether they actually do, whether it does have any impact?
MS. PENNY: I don't know if we have any hard and fast evidence that cold temperatures would effect them but it should, it has an impact on every other insect that we've got. I think what we're experiencing now is since we've been having milder and milder winters, that's also an issue that is helping or aiding the survivability of this beetle in that. I just don't think it is freezing down to the level where it needs to, or for long enough, yes, that's the key thing, it needs to do it consistently and for a long period of time and we don't get that presently.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Any notions on the direction, like the way most of the population samples seem to be going here, where they're being trapped?
MR. FANNING: I'm not sure if there is. I could be wrong here but I think whether or not the hurricane brought it that way, I'm not sure, but it has created downed wood, which may be attracting the beetles north and eastward, I don't know. I don't think there was a whole lot of damage out in Sheet Harbour, for the out-lyer, but it was a port, so maybe it got there by another means. We find the same buildup of spruce beetle in central Nova Scotia is getting quite dramatic and maybe that's causing that movement, I don't know.
We do have samples sort of west and then northwest but we haven't found damage yet. Not as predominant, so we're not sure.
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MR. CHAIRMAN: Okay, I think I had better cut myself off at this stage. So with the start of the second round, Mr. Theriault you are at the top of the list.
MR. THERIAULT: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. You say these bugs just attack spruce trees. We know why they wouldn't go for a hardwood tree, they would wear their teeth out getting an inch inside of them, but do we know why they're not going for pine trees, because it would be a softer wood, again, and easier?
MS. PENNY: I don't know, again I don't think we have any science on why they choose spruce over another. There is just a relationship between the spruce and this brown spruce longhorn beetle and that seems to be . . .
MR. THERIAULT: There's not much study on the makeup of these.
MS. PENNY: Not to my knowledge . . .
MR. CUNNINGHAM: The Canadian Forest Service did some host specificity at trials but that was in a laboratory setting and with wood bolts in a lab the larvae were able to actually emerge out of pine and I think out of fir as well, but that's in a lab setting, it's a forced setting. Even when we're explaining that to the U.S., for example, and our Dr. Jon Sweeney with the Canadian Forest Services, explaining that it is in the context that we've never seen it affecting pine, fir in the wild, in the natural-type setting and it's only been under that forced setting.
So yes, the European literature does indicate that it can affect some other softwood species but it is one that we're basically putting in context.
You'll find other insects, too, like the hemlock looper attacks fir. We have jack pine budworm that will attack white pine so sometimes their name is always not - for some reason there is some attractant to that tree that makes the better home. We generally find that in there. But, what they'll do under forced conditions, we don't really know.
MR. THERIAULT: I've been just sitting here thinking, I wonder if we could introduce them to alders because down in western Nova Scotia, we could feed them all, no problem. (Laughter)
What's the worst case scenario for this province if these beetles cannot be brought under control?
MR. FANNING: Well, that's a tough one because we ultimately - all effort goes into eradication with any invasive species, as it should be. Some people like to debate it, I think it's irresponsible not to try. You have to try, your science and everything, to do what you can.
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If, at some point, that looks impossible, you have to go into control and management as best you can with what tools you have. I think the Canadian agency doesn't want to see this spread much farther, so I think a lot of effort goes into trying to do what you can.
The worst case scenario? It just starts creeping across the Canadian and North American landscape until we have a far worse situation on the other side of Canada with the mountain pine beetle coming East.
MR. THERIAULT: So we could annihilate the whole spruce tree system in this country if it can't be stopped?
MR. CUNNINGHAM: That would be difficult to say, it moves slowly, if it would even happen in the first place, or whether or not there's some other natural thing comes into place and in a number of years it starts slowing it down. We're fortunate right now that it seems to be slow. It's not like the emerald ash borer we've come across in Ontario and it's moving tens of kilometres at a time, like it's flying over your shoulder and going, this isn't.
But, what it does do is, in the future if it can't be stopped, it slowly progresses farther and farther on our resource and that's not a good thing.
MR. MACKINNON: Mr. Chairman, you stole part of my question. My question was going to be in relationship to the direction that we seem to have the spread going, primarily North and that's a real concern to me as the member for Pictou East. Forestry is extremely important to my constituency and that seems at this point to be the direction. What really bothers me, in relationship to the eastern area is that, on the 40 kilometre point, we have identification and the rings actually go to 70 kilometres. If there were further rings, we would have one, two, three, four, five more of them. So, actually, the way the crow flies, 55 kilometres between the 40 and the one that's way out there beyond all the circles. Right?
MS. PENNY: Yes.
MR. MACKINNON: And look at the forest land that there is in between there. Tremendous, tremendous amounts of forest. Is there any way of explaining that?
MR. CUNNINGHAM: It would be really tough at this point. I think this time next year, I would hope the surveying, going to the intensity that it does, helps us to do that. If we found that gap still exists between Sheet Harbour and the other one, it may be derived by port and it's not moving through the forest there. But I'd be really stepping over the line to say that at this point.
This is kind of what we know we have and everybody in industry is in agreement right now and says, sample this thing, saturate the area and let's get a better picture after the season to say, okay, yeah it is an extremely serious situation or maybe it's not as bad as we
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thought, or something in between. We really don't know. The fact it's there is a concern, no question.
MR. MACKINNON: The Chair in the past has taken me to task for the use of language, so I will say heck. But, that is a heck of a distance to go for a steak dinner for this horrible little pest. To me, I find this hard to comprehend that there is such a distance.
MR. CUNNINGHAM: I think we've focused on the possible movement along the Hurricane Juan corridor over the last couple of years. I think that's a fairly valid thought process. But, when you look at the Sheet Harbour location, as Walter says, we don't really know specifically, but as you know, to use the work heck there is a heck of a lot of wood product moving through that port area as well. It is drawing from other areas into that port too, so there is some possibility of artificial movement, too.
MR. MACKINNON: It could be like the green crab which was always believed to have come up the Eastern Seaboard from the U.S. and actually, some DNA that has been done has indicated that perhaps there were three different areas of infestation and one of them was in the Port Hawkesbury area and the other was where bilge has been pumped out in the St. Lawrence. The DNA has shown, I believe, that there were three actual introductions to this area. I guess a parallel may be drawn there, but I just hope that other areas are doing significant testing, areas beyond Nova Scotia and you had mentioned the numbers, but it would give us some comfort if we knew that other areas were being tested and if the problem is elsewhere there would be a stronger force available to fight it than there is with Nova Scotia going it alone. Thank you.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. MacKinnon was the last one on my list, so I'm looking for interveners at this stage, otherwise it will be me and I'm not sure if the members are all in favour of that. Mr. Dunn.
MR. DUNN: Mr. Chairman, just one last question. How optimistic are we as far as containing them or decreasing the population? I suppose we're not in the comfort zone, or is it too early in the stages to determine?
MS. PENNY: I would like to think that we're optimistic because we're continually moving forward, we're producing a better lure, our science is getting better, so I would like to feel we're moving toward that optimistic viewpoint.
MR. FANNING: I think if we look at just in the MO zone, I think we had evidence that the work of the CFIA, ourselves and others, we're starting to see a decrease in the population of the BSLB in areas because they were taking some active role in doing that. All of a sudden last year, finding 18 more kind of changes the thought here, now this work that we're doing we thought was really good in the core, we now have 18 sites outside. I would say it's a little early and that with the trapping next year we will have a little bit better picture to say, are we in that control point that yes, we can maintain a population or lower it or
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whether or not it's just going to progress a lot farther and be beyond our means. I'd say we are early yet, this time next year we should have better answers and I think that was part of the stakeholder plan to get at those answers, those are a typical sampling, go after this thing a little bit harder. I think that has been agreed to.
MR. CHAIRMAN: I'm curious about is there a point when this will become a naturalized species or it will become a native species and will that be a political thing, that determination? What would be the factors that would kind of make us say, we put up the good fight but this thing is staying? It is a comment that I think, Mr. Fanning, you made about becoming a native species. What makes that determination?
MR. FANNING: A lot of it is biology because on a typical insect, once you start finding all of the life cycles and it's surviving here for a number of years, we're saying it is naturalized. I don't know if it ever becomes a native pest, it's still an invasive pest but it's just handled differently because it is now in our environment, so you just look to manage it. In this case finding it late kind of made different guidelines on how we and the CFI have tackled it. At some point down here that would become the case, we've done everything, we've provided that, but in that means all that work for us hopefully gives us those tools to actually manage it, which we don't have now.
In a lot of cases, that is why we go for the pheromones in a lot of them because that tells us where the insect is. In this case, we are just at the point where we are able to say, we have refined it enough, you should be able to go out now and say, yes, we know it is here for sure, it is not just an outlyer, someone took a hitchhike and ended up in Glenmore Mountain somewhere, which would be rare. I think at some point, now whether that is two years, four years, five years, I don't know but I think it has been treated differently because it has been here, it has been slow moving and I think everybody is trying to do what they can to stop it. The decision will have to be asked but I think some of it is biological and with the CFIA and the regulatory process.
MR. MACQUARRIE: Unless the trapping finds it already across eastern North America, with this slow rate of spread, there is probably going to be a frontier for a long time and even if that frontier moves beyond Nova Scotia, there is always going to be another jurisdiction where it is not known to exist. At what point do you say we don't care if it gets to New Brunswick, we don't care if it gets to Quebec, we don't care if it gets to Maine or New Hampshire. If its tree preference stays quite selective, if it's really red spruce that is most vulnerable, well red spruce is common here and the further north, west and south you go, red spruce turns into almost an endangered species. So the level of tolerance to it arriving will change from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
MR. CHAIRMAN: The other jurisdictions where you put traps, have there been any positives? Have they found anything?
MS. PENNY: No.
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MR. CHAIRMAN: No, not yet. Is there a difference about the resin weeping out of the trees, is that how we would identify our own native species? Is it the exact same thing?
MS. PENNY: That's a good question. I don't think so.
MR. CUNNINGHAM: Georgette Smith is the scientist with Canadian Forest Service that has followed that one and she has indicated no, it is very unique but it's a little more confounding. In Point Pleasant Park we were seeing brown spruce longhorn beetle infested trees, bolts were taken from those trees and that is basically the only species that were reared out of those trees, in most cases. There were other species but you get into some of these outer areas, it's kind of a chicken and the egg thing. It could be the spruce beetle that we are talking about affecting areas in western Nova Scotia, attacking first, perhaps weakening the tree a little bit. Then you get a complex. So it is not a simple situation.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Is the resin as a result of when the larva bores in or is it when the adult bores out? Does the adult come out the same hole that the larva went in?
MS. PENNY: I think the adult doesn't come out the same hole as the larva went in so basically you have the larva in the tree and the egg will get inserted under the bark, the larva will mine into the tree and it will emerge later on. I think the resin is basically just the tree's defence mechanism.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Its reaction.
MS. PENNY: Yes, its response to being attacked and trying to basically drown out or pitch out the invader.
MR. CHAIRMAN: So when the adult comes out, it goes the shortest distance. It doesn't go through the whole length of the tree to get to the other side, it will just go to . . .
MS. PENNY: Yes, it has meandering galleries, so it will take the shortest distance.
MR. CHAIRMAN: I think it was Mr. Fanning who mentioned something about quality control. What do you mean by that?
MR. FANNING: In the early part, when CFIA, the first year or so the department, CFIA had a number of people involved with the problem, the issue in Point Pleasant Park. We provided a large number of forest technicians. They spend the majority of their time in the woods and they are quite good. We offered them, at one point in time at Point Pleasant Park we put over 45 department staff in Point Pleasant Park to count every tree and try to find this. We look at them as quite advanced because of their forestry training and their visual acuity in the woods and they spend their time there, with that early work, they became quite good at it and we have several staff in Shubenacadie who, I think, are very good at it. So when they came on earlier with their crews, they brought 35 surveyors in from various
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backgrounds, a lot of science backgrounds, to do the survey work. What we would do is, we would send our people in and kind of check 10 per cent of their plots, to make sure that what they were identifying was actually infecting trees. So that was used on the crews - because we could go into the crew and they'd say okay, this was Joyce MacDonald's crew that did it and we found that our people said that three trees of the six they found were infested. So they'd go back to their crew and help improve them. So that's how we'd work them and try to make sure that what they found was actually it. And they went on the safe side. Their crews became very proficient and needed less of that later, but that's how we helped with our forestry people.
MR. CUNNINGHAM: Through our survey subcommittee that's a way that we kind of assign an independent body to look at the work of crews that were basically covering 1,200 square kilometres of trees, of spruce. Running lines through those areas, so with that amount of coverage, you wanted to have some kind of body anyway, just determining, are they just covering the ground, or are they really getting a good look at these trees, and it was a very effective means of kind of having a check or balance to the whole process.
MR. FANNING: It wasn't just ourselves, but we were involved with that.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Back to my question about the possibility of cross-breeding between these two similar species. Would we know it, even if it happened?
MS. PENNY: I guess the way we would know is if we found a resulting beetle that sort of didn't follow the characteristics of either/or, so it would have to go through an entire cycle to see the resulting offspring, and that's the way we would know, I would assume.
MR. CHAIRMAN: We don't do DNA testing on any of the beetles that we take?
MS. PENNY: Actually, I think they do. There are molecular techniques that are being developed, and beetles are sent away, I believe, to a lab in Ottawa and they'll do genetic testing, or molecular techniques on those beetles, to identity them properly. . .
MR. MACKINNON: One horn, Mr. Chairman.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Something I noticed in my area, and I asked one of the fellows who works at Elmsdale Lumber about this. I didn't really get an answer, but I noticed that the Junipers or larch are, in some places, dying, or the needles were all brown and so I was really curious as to whether there was anything identified in the province that was attacking that species and when I would see it, it wouldn't just be one tree, it would be groups of trees. Maybe there would be a dozen trees together and maybe eight of them would be brown and the other four would be green and so I'm just curious, is there anything that you're aware of that's . . .
MR. FANNING: This is like throughout the summer season, when they're in foliage?
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MR. CHAIRMAN: Yes.
MS. PENNY: Yes, there are insects that attack larch, but there has not been anything, to my knowledge, identified in the province.
MR. FANNING: The reason I asked the time of the year is that some people look in the Fall and they see it loses its needles. It's the only softwood that does that. But there are some out there, but we haven't seen or experienced it but I know there was an issue during the white marked tussock moth in 1998, because it liked larch. It would strip it, but it would respond later on in the summer and regrow a second group of needles and survive. But, again, if we know areas like that and we have technicians going through, they can drop in and take them in for Gina and others or Gina can visit.
MR. CHAIRMAN: That was in Hardwood Lands, not too far from Shubenacadie.
Mr. Belliveau.
MR. BELLIVEAU: I just wanted to confirm that the hackmatck in our area is basically, we had the moths, and I'm trying to think what it was but I play a little bit of golf. Some of my buddies go in the trees and we've observed this, but there are some really serious effects with the hackmatacks but they seemed like they recover type of thing. And the moths - I always thought it was in early summer when they were doing this but the caterpillars actually were just dropping off the trees, but this was really a large infestation of them in that area. I don't know if it was just for that one particular area, or was across Nova Scotia but it was there.
MR. FANNING: One of the things we have too, there's 18 pest detection officers within the regional services branch, like Shelburne, I'm not sure who the new PDO would be down there in Shelburne and those other areas, but they're there for a contact to go out and get that and if they can't identify it easily, again they can ship it to Gina to identify and find out, and that's relatively easy, like our secretary refuses to open up their mail sometimes.
MS. PENNY: I get all sorts of stuff.
MR. CHAIRMAN: If members have no further questions - I know in our case our caucus met at 10:30 a.m. - I wonder if you want to sum up and I want to thank Mr. Cunningham for being here as well, we really appreciate it, but do you have any comments you want to kind of wrap this up with, we would be glad to have them.
MR. FANNING: We were pleased to be asked here, to come for information, and provide that. We're not far away for more. I think right now the stakeholder plan that's in front of everyone is getting a good response and we're very optimistic that that will continue over the next few days and weeks as we get ready for the flight season for this BSLB which starts about mid-April and we're looking forward to that producing more information, not
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just for us, but we want to be able to answer those questions like why is that there, what's going on. The people who have spent some time on that have done a very good job. We've been a part of it but there are a lot of people in there who have contributed to it and it looks quite good, very good.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you. We have CFIA on our list to come before the committee. Probably Mr. Cunningham will be back and we'll get a whole other list of questions to grill you with.
MR. CUNNINGHAM: Maybe we'll have more answers at that time, you know, with things coming to a head now.
MR. CHAIRMAN: That's actually what I was hoping. I want to thank Mr. Underwood.
MR. UNDERWOOD: If I could just make a couple of concluding remarks. I think you can all see that we have a really good team of folks and experts working on this file. Just to go to the point that a number of the committee members raised with respect to the proposal that was put forward jointly to the CFIA, they've been very co-operative, not only at the staff level and the science level.
As recently as last week I was having conversations with the vice-president of CFIA, I've been in constant contact with Diana Blenkhorn from the Maritime Lumber Bureau, and my feeling is that we have a good process here that's going to find the best solution to this problem in a very co-operative way and everybody is working very well together. So I feel quite comfortable about it. It's almost unusual, in my experience, in some of these issues to see that level of teamwork and I'm very pleased with that. On behalf of the group, thanks for the opportunity to come before you today and if you have any questions that you forgot to ask or that come to your mind, please, just let any of us know and we'll be happy to answer them.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Thanks, Mr. Underwood. I didn't get to you actually when I was running through my thanks. This is a fairly extensive list and we only had three at the panel. So I want to thank Mr. Beyeler and you for being here and maybe in some other case we'll get you at the front. Thanks very much.
MR. MACKINNON: Mr. Chairman, I think they deserve a round of applause. We don't usually do that. (Applause)
MR. CHAIRMAN: We stand adjourned.
[The committee adjourned at 10:48 a.m.]
