Timber Supply — Issue No. 13 — Thursday, June 21, 2012 (HTML)

Present: John Rustad, MLA (Chair); Norm Macdonald, MLA (Deputy Chair); Harry Bains, MLA; Donna Barnett, MLA; Eric Foster, MLA; Bill Routley, MLA; Ben Stewart, MLA

1. The Chair called the Committee to order at 9:05 a.m. and made opening remarks.

2. The following witnesses appeared before the Committee and answered questions.

The following electronic version is for informational purposes only.
The printed version remains the official version.

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SPECIAL COMMITTEE ON
TIMBER SUPPLY


CONTENTS
Page
Presentations	356
S. Green
F. Everitt
J. Steidle
G. Stewart
B. McLean
D. King
M. Johnson
S. Serup
D. Coxson
K. Hodges
A. Cheramy
D. Radies
M. MacDonald

J. Rustad (Chair): Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our continuing community consultation with the Special Committee on Timber Supply. My name is John Rustad. I'm the MLA for Nechako Lakes, and I'm the Chair of the committee.

We'll start things off a little differently this morning. I'm going to start with introductions of our members, starting with Bill here on our left.

N. Macdonald (Deputy Chair): Good morning. I'm Norm Macdonald, and I represent Columbia River–Revelstoke.

B. Stewart: Good morning. I'm Ben Stewart, and I'm the MLA for Westside-Kelowna.

D. Barnett: Good morning. I'm Donna Barnett, and I represent the Cariboo-Chilcotin.

J. Rustad (Chair): Along with the MLAs on our committee, we also have a number of people with us. Starting off on my left here is Craig James, who is the Clerk of the House and who is in subbing for Kate Ryan-Lloyd in doing the committee work. As well, we have Jacqueline Quesnel at the back, who is registering everybody. Just as a reminder, as you're coming in, make sure that you check in with Jacqueline if you plan to make a presentation to our committee.

Also, all the proceedings of our committee are broadcast live over the Internet and are recorded by Hansard Services. Hansard has done a great job here with the tour, and today we have with us Monique Goffinet Miller and Jean Medland.

The purpose of the Special Committee on Timber Supply is to look at the challenge that we are facing with the mountain pine beetle epidemic. The committee was struck in May, and it has a mandate to try to look at options to mitigate the timber supply component. How can we potentially expand the fibre supply available through the mid-term — if there are any options at all?

The committee will wrap up its hearings by July 20. For the public component, this week we started off in Smithers. We've been in Houston, Burns Lake, Fraser Lake, Vanderhoof and Fort St. James. Today we're in Prince George. This afternoon we're up in Mackenzie. Tomorrow we'll be in McBride and Valemount.

The week of July 2 we'll be in Quesnel, 100 Mile House, Williams Lake and then back up here in PG. The following week, the week of July 9, we're going to be in Vancouver for three days of provincial meetings and then finish the tour with Merritt and Kamloops.

People can make written submissions to our committee as well. They can find us on the website, which is www.leg.bc.ca/timbercommittee. As well, on that website are all of the recordings of these proceedings as well as all the other background information the committee has received over time on all the issues you can think of, everything from timber supply right through to the impact of the mountain pine beetle epidemic.

The challenge that we're facing, that we're looking at is that over the next two to ten years, depending on the shelf life of the pine beetle, the estimated impact across the supply area in the Interior — that's from the Houston-Smithers area down to 100 Mile House or perhaps into the Kamloops-Merritt area — is a drop of about ten million cubic metres per year.

To put that into perspective, that's about the equivalent of eight fairly reasonably sized sawmills. Obviously, that's a pretty significant impact, so the task in front of us is pretty significant, as we go through this process.

The reason why we're trying to come through this in a fairly rapid time frame is, of course, that we need to start looking at trying to bring some certainty to what that mid-term fibre supply can look like. Whatever recommendations we come up with, the ministry then would have an opportunity to look at them. They may accept all, some or none of our recommendations, but at least it'll create a framework for where we may be going beyond that.

In each of the communities we're going to we spend some time with the mayor and council as part of a round table, we spend some time with First Nations, and then we have an opportunity for public input. Being that today is National Aboriginal Day, we have decided not to hold the round-table discussions with First Nations today. Rather, we will do that component in Prince George on July 6.

The committee has two special advisers that have been appointed to it, former chief foresters. I would like to introduce Larry Pedersen today, who is with us. Jim Snetsinger is unable to be travelling with us this week, but I am told that he is listening in to our discussions on the Internet as we go.

As well, I would like to recognize that we have a number of professionals from the Ministry of Forests that have been travelling with us. They have been doing a great job in terms of providing us with all the background
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information and stuff.

In particular, I want to recognize Dave Peterson, who is our current chief forester and who has dedicated a lot of time to coming through this process with us, being able to provide information to us. Ultimately, whatever we end up coming up with and whatever the ministry decides, Dave's the person who is going to have to make some decisions as to how the timber supply process will end up being implemented.

Having said all of that, we will start with our initial process, which is to invite Mayor Shari Green, and anyone that may be with you, to come up, and we'll start our consultation process.

This is a period of time…. You have about half an hour, perhaps a little more, to give us a presentation — your thoughts on what we should be thinking about, what sorts of priorities we should have and keep in mind, as we go through this process and try to come up with some recommendations to help mitigate through this challenge.

S. Green: Well, thank you very much. I can assure you, and to the relief of everyone, that I will not require half an hour. It'll just be a few moments.

I would just like to introduce Frank Everitt, who is a city councillor on my team at the city of Prince George.

We do have a manager of community forests for Prince George, who was unable to be here. He's written some notes for me to share with you today and to talk a little bit about where he sees timber supply as it relates to the city of Prince George. Then a few thoughts from me, just with respect to conversation in the community about how people feel about the volume-based versus area-based tenure issue.

With respect to the timber supply, some of the considerations that the city would like you to think about are that there is an opportunity to provide all the communities in the region with a more direct role in forest management and in the benefits derived from the region's forests and to incorporate some community resilience considerations into any major forest management decision-making that the government would do.

Transportation and infrastructure in services — obviously important. I would probably have more councillors with me here today, but they're viewing a pothole-patching machine called the Python 5000, which is something this community has been waiting to see. It's happening while this is happening, so as soon as we're done here, Frank and I will be departing to join them with that. So transportation infrastructure in and around the region is obviously something that we all need to be thinking about.

Thinking about things for increasing the range of products that are generated from our region's forest resources, certainly, and what high-value and locally wealth-generating products are best suited for production in this region. Thinking about our dead pine stands and how they're managed in a manner that addresses, of course, economic but also environmental utility.

Bioenergy is something. In this community we've got a district energy system here and a great partnership with Lakeland Mills, but we want to make sure that we do have a positive and a competitive business climate for bioenergy development, doing that through integrated policy, regulatory, tenure and pricing.

We think about growing our forests in the future so that we've got large-scale investment in a targeted reforestation program. We need to make sure we have new trees growing, so silviculture is pretty critical.

We've also always had very strong presence and participation on OBAC, the Omineca Beetle Action Coalition. I'm sure you'll be hearing from them, if you haven't already, with respect to the mid-term timber supply issue. They're looking at things like the need to diversify the forest sector — a much wider range of timber and non-timber forest products.

Thinking about some of these major forest management decisions that can be beneficial or harmful to community interests. We want to make sure — again, similar to what the city's view is — that there is a more direct role for communities in the management of the forests.

With respect to tenure and area-based and volume-based. Something OBAC has indicated — and also conversations I've had with people in our community — is that moving from volume-based to area-based can be a concern for some people — certainly, for tenure holders. Will it create some inequity in the location of the tenure? If there are no area mills already in place, it could work. But are you picking winners and losers, because there are locations of some mills — in certain locations. So transportation might become an issue as well. Those are just some of the things that have been shared with me to share with you.

I'm not sure, Frank, if you would like to add some thoughts from your perspective.

F. Everitt: I'll try and put the other hat on. Thank you very much. I've had the opportunity to speak to you in the committee in Burns Lake. I will take an opportunity to speak to you further when you come back again.

All of you know that Prince George is a forestry-based community. That's where it started out from, and it con-
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tinues to be an active force within our community in generating jobs and employment for folks.

Part of your mandate is to look at visual quality and the mid-term timber supply. From my perspective — and I've said this at a number of opportunities — visual quality, in my view, has something to do with green timber growing, as opposed to dead trees along our corridor. Certainly, if we had done the replanting, we wouldn't have so much non-sufficiently restocked within the communities around Prince George and area.

We need to have a strategy where we have enhanced silviculture that brings together that problem of non-sufficiently restocked planting. That also, with enhancing of fertilization, would allow us to have the biomass energy–thinning process, and we'd be able to feed that part of the industry to create jobs and employment within the area.

Your task is not easy, because there are always competing forces for you to take into consideration when you do that, but I want to remind you that forestry has produced good-paying jobs within our community, which allows us to have tax dollars come to the province and also allows us to build the schools and hospitals that our citizens require.

Thank you very much for the opportunity to say a few words in addition to Your Worship's.

J. Rustad (Chair): Thank you very much, Shari and Frank. I will turn it over to committee members for questions.

N. Macdonald (Deputy Chair): In terms of NSR, I think the Forest Practices Board is going to be issuing another report next week just on the scale of the problem there.

I'm interested in two things. One would be value-added. But before we get to that, I know that Prince George has done work with…. You talked about community energy. I'd be interested in what you're doing there. The other thing I'd be interested in is some of the work that Prince George has done around interface fire.

People have talked about how you've used the community forest, and you've dealt with a number of different problems and found a solution that works. Maybe you could just describe for the group some of the things that Prince George has done that might be applied to other communities.

S. Green: Certainly. With respect to our district energy system, it was just commissioned last week. It's located just down the street, at 2nd and George. Through a grant, federally and provincially, and some money from the city, we were able to build a community energy system that provides hot water heat to a variety of civic buildings along the George Street corridor and over to our civic centre, art gallery, pool, library, our new RCMP building and city hall. As well, the city is creating partnerships with private businesses that wish to hook into the system.

In creating all of that, we have a partnership with Lakeland Mills. They will be providing us the fuel. Of course, when their mill exploded, that created a bit of uncertainty in terms of our partnership and our ability to run our system, but we've been successful in that. They've been able to provide us what we need, and we're very thankful for that.

It's just in its beginning stage, but it's such an important project for the community because it helps us meet our greenhouse gas emission reductions. It's also reducing a tremendous amount of fine particulate from our airshed.

We've got an air quality issue in our community. We'll probably always have that because of the geography of our location, and we do have some industry located in the bowl. One of the major benefits of producing and having that system is that we have dramatically reduced the air quality emissions that will come from that site — because of the district energy system.

With respect to wildfire mitigation. The city has done quite an extensive amount of work around that in our community forest process. I don't know a ton about it myself, but I know that it's something we have worked very hard on.

We are in consultation right now on expansion of our community forest, talking to the Farmers Institute and the local rancher associations in our more rural areas. So that work is ongoing.

N. Macdonald (Deputy Chair): I think the other very interesting thing about Prince George is that you have UNBC. You have the possibility for other institutions that are looking at new products. I know that you host — even recently, bioenergy — a number of groups that are looking at innovation, and what we've heard in a lot of communities is the need for innovation.

And I think, Frank, you and others have referred to the need for more value-added.

But all of these are complex things to bring forward, so maybe you can speak to what Prince George brings to the table in terms of leading in innovation.

S. Green: Sure. Well, with the downturn in the forest economy many years ago, Prince George was forced to diversify. The university arrived about 20 years ago and has just been a tremendous asset to this community. It has become the green university of Canada. That's how they promote themselves. They do a great job, and they've got a tremendous bioenergy program and a plant up at UNBC as well.

There's a lot of great research being done, lots of innovative things being done, and Prince George is considered the Saudi Arabia of biomass. That was kind of the conversation last week at the International Bioenergy
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Conference that was held here in Prince George. We had people come from all over the world to gather in Prince George and talk about bioenergy. Those are things that I think will just continue to grow.

Prince George has also, because of many of the climate change initiatives that we have made here, become just the fifth city in the country to receive the Federation of Canadian Municipalities Partners for Climate Protection, milestone 5. That's kind of a long title. There are five milestones that each community can achieve, as well as corporately, and we have achieved all five of those. We're the fourth in British Columbia, and I believe there's one in New Brunswick.

So we are definitely leading the way across the country in terms of the initiatives that we have in the community.

N. Macdonald (Deputy Chair): Just one other quick question. For a long time we've been hearing about Prince George, a centre for excellence in wood products and innovation. Where does that stand, and what sort of things do you see the province should be doing to push not only bioenergy but other value-added opportunities?

S. Green: Well, directly across the street from the hotel that we're sitting in right now is a beautiful empty lot awaiting the wood innovation and design centre construction. This is a project that the city of Prince George and the community has been behind from day one, which is to create a centre of excellence for wood innovation and design.

It has been a while in coming, but it's on its way. I believe requests for a proposal will be going out very soon, and I'm hoping that we'll see some concrete poured in the ground by the end of the fall. We will have an incredible downtown campus with some great programs that will provide some study in wood design and all of the different things that can be done, to be building with wood. That is something that we're very much looking forward to.

H. Bains: Thank you for the presentation. I guess, around the area of what we've heard: the timber supply going down post–pine beetle, ten million cubic metres and eight mills possibly going down…. What that means is either we somehow increase the timber supply — we know there are challenges — or we do more with less that is available. That will force us into innovation and finding new ways of using the fibre that is available.

Do you believe in or do you have any suggestions around tying the timber supply to jobs that are created with it? Rather than simply saying, "Here's the timber supply. Make 2-by-4s or do whatever you want to do with it," which means that if you don't do anything, eight mills will go down. I think in order to avoid that, is there any suggestion that…? How do we go about it so that we could utilize the timber that is available, produce more jobs with the cubic metres of logs available? Any idea there?

S. Green: I wish I had the magic answer for that, but I guess just my first reaction is that there have been many mills that have already gone down. If the change in the tenure and how we address timber supply is intended to make sure we don't lose more mills, you need to balance that. The mills that are operational and successful and thriving and doing well — what choices have they already made in their operation in terms of efficiency and things that they've had to do to make it through these tough times?

I guess I would just be concerned about the fairness, if you will, for those that have already sacrificed an operation, for lack of a better word, for the sake of the rest of their organization and the other mills that they have.

F. Everitt: Well, I think that a lot of operations have looked at the value-added that you're talking about, Harry, and we've had in the Prince George area a number of value-added operations that have come and gone because they couldn't make it in the business.

Now, there are a whole bunch of reasons why those operations went down, but I don't think that we should discontinue that. In business that happens. Some people are entrepreneurs and make it through to the other side of it. Some go and try it, because they've seen that somebody else did that, and aren't successful.

I agree with the concept that we should try and produce a product to the best of our ability before we try and sell that, as opposed to raw log exports, if you will. I think that in Prince George we've got facilities that are doing some value-added, and up along the corridor that you just came from a number of facilities there are doing it as well. They are successful and have been in business for quite some time.

H. Bains: Just to follow up. I get that, and there are operations that have invested heavily into their mills, and they're doing well. We need to protect that. But you also talk about…. There are certain areas we have a shortage of logs. There are other areas we see logs going on the trucks and right straight to the Prince Rupert port and gone. We don't see them again, except that they come back with a finished product.

Is there a way to look, by different communities working together, to see if we could keep those logs here so that we could supply our mills and those who want to be innovative, want to make some different products, want to come back into the industry, and reward them with those logs rather than allow them to be shipped out?
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S. Green: Well, I'll give you my gut reaction on that. I would love to see manufacture of amazing furniture right here in British Columbia, for example, and there are places that do that. I have a retail background and sell furniture in the store that I still own and never am in, because I'm busy being the mayor now.

There's a balance between the price that people are willing to pay for what is great quality and…. You think about the very economical options that people have at Costco and JYSK and things like that from product that you know has been made in China or elsewhere with wood that probably came from British Columbia. That is a mindset that the consumer has to get their head around, and I don't know how you change that.

Certainly, people support local when they can, and that momentum is growing — and realization in the community that if I spend my dollar in my community, it will stay in my community. But they need to have a better understanding of the whole chain and back to the source of that. I don't know that everybody appreciates that, and for many people, frankly, they just don't care. They're worried about their chequebook and where their bank balance is at, and they're going to find the best price they can for their product. Often it comes from overseas.

J. Rustad (Chair): Thank you for that. We've got two other people who wanted to ask a question, but I want to ask a quick question. I'm going to inject myself as well.

S. Green: I couldn't answer that. I don't know, but I can get the information for you.

J. Rustad (Chair): It's interesting. I'm just wondering, because in each community we've been to, some have community forests, some don't, and some would like community forests. So I'm just interested in terms of what that is and what role that plays within the community in terms of projects.

J. Rustad (Chair): Well, it's an area-based tenure, so I'm just wondering about that. Okay, thanks.

B. Stewart: Your Worship, I just have a question. First of all, the district energy project — I remember that being first shared with me when it hadn't actually happened. It was just an idea. I'm glad to see that it's progressed.

I don't think that any of us would have expected the risk that perhaps is there with the unfortunate circumstances about the Lakeland mill. Obviously, that isn't the first consideration because of the issue around the workers and things like that that have been affected by the mill shutdown, but what risk mitigation is on the horizon if the mill was to not be rebuilt?

It may take even 18 or 24 months for a rebuild from the date that that decision is made. But what risk mitigation…? Or is there any work being done on that, just so we better understand that in terms of the fact that there's been a commitment by the taxpayers and the citizens here and the people that depend on that now?

S. Green: Thankfully, our system on the Lakeland side, the energy transfer station, was not damaged at all. Of course, in the moment and in the days after the explosion I was asked this question many, many times. We just said: "It's secondary to everything else going on, and we'll get to it when we get to it."

We do have a backup system for the district energy plant through natural gas, so we were able to meet our contract commitments with anyone that we've signed up with already. So we weren't concerned in that respect, because we would be able operate the district energy system without the fuel supply from Lakeland.

Fortunately, they've been able to provide us the fuel that's required, so we are fully operational in the way it's designed and intended. So we've got our primary fuel source. We have our backup ability as well.

B. Routley: Thank you for your presentation. The comment about the need for enhanced silviculture…. I had the opportunity to travel to Sweden, and they're actually harvesting wood for manufacturing plants as well pulp mills within existing stands. As they're doing the enhanced silviculture at 25 to 30 years of age of a stand, they're actually finding fibre supply. So I wondered if your community or others had looked at some of those opportunities. Are you aware, one way or the other, of the situation with some of the second-growth stands?

One of the concerns that I have, personally…. Having seen right here in British Columbia five- or ten- or 15-year-old stands that have been under attack by beetle or other diseases, and the fact that we have NSR and a lack of boots-on-the-ground updated inventory, I wonder if you have, along with looking at biodiversity, looked at the opportunities that might be available through enhanced silviculture and that kind of thing.

S. Green: I would have to defer to any of the area experts in the room that might come before you later today that could probably give a more educated answer with respect to that.

From the community perspective, Prince George has
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always been a place that is invaded by the tree planter world, if you will. Throughout the summer you see tree planters everywhere. Every parking lot of every hotel in town is full.

Over the last several years we've noticed…. There's a noticeable decline. You don't see as many tree planters in the community as you used to. So there is sort of the general consensus that they're either elsewhere further out, planting somewhere else, or it's just not as big a program as it used to be.

J. Rustad (Chair): Thank you for that, and thank you very much for finding some time to present to the committee — to both Frank and Shari.

At this time, we're scheduled to start the public proceedings in a short bit, so I will ask that we take a quick recess.

J. Rustad (Chair): Good morning. We're now entering into our public consultation component. The public consultation will be 15 minutes per presenter. The presenter has the option of however they'd like to use that — if they want to use the full 15 minutes or perhaps use a little bit less time and then be able to allow for some questions and answers.

J. Steidle: Thanks for allowing me to speak to the committee here today. I'm just going to wing it. I didn't really prepare any talk per se or something.

I grew up south of Prince George in the Punchaw area. It's about a 40-minute drive south of town, in the middle of what once was a vast forest. You know, the drive out there…. When I was kid, at the top of certain hills you'd look around, and all you'd see would be trees. Now when I go out there, you look around and all you see are clearcuts. It's a vast change in the landscape in 20 years.

I grew up working in the sawmill. My dad worked at the Clear Lake sawmill. That got shut down last year because of a number of reasons, one of which was that they ran of easy wood. Planted a lot of trees. Spent four years planting trees. I worked for five years in a sawmill, you know, doing everything — working on the greenchain, in the planer, finger-joiner.

Now, kind of to complete the cycle, I'm a carpenter. I do heritage restoration in Vancouver. I run a small woodshop selling furniture items — little cases, little knick-knacks and stuff like that. Primarily, I do carpentry, rebuilding old buildings in the Downtown Eastside.

This whole thing about opening up more land for logging, at least in the area…. I'll talk specifically about the Punchaw area. I don't really where you can get more wood out of that area. I was going to felt-in a map just to show how much has been logged, but it was pretty tough to do. I wasn't really that well prepared. I can show you a map. I don't know if this really carries out. I'll walk it by really quickly.

J. Rustad (Chair): Sorry. Just remember that as this process goes, anything you say won't be able to be recorded unless you're by the microphone.

J. Steidle: So I've been working on this place called Rosebud Mountain, trying to get that area protected. It's a little white area in the middle of this vast clearcut. Now, a lot of people talk about the Bowron clearcut in the '80s. Well, down on the 1400 Road there's another massive clearcut that probably equals in size the Bowron clearcut. It was a big, flat, sandy area full of pine stands. A lot of it got hit by the pine beetle and was logged.

The last area that I'm trying to get saved is actually a Douglas fir–dominant area. There are 500-year-old Douglas firs up there. It's a very important wintering habitat for mule deer.

There's an aspen forest on one side. It's a very beautiful area. In the midst of all this logging and all of this ugliness, there's this one last little beautiful place.

You think about other values of the forest — tourism value, recreational value. It's a big destination for hunters. I started doing a little bit of video work, and I recorded a lot of hunters going through the area. Bear hunters love it; moose hunters love it. It used to be called Moose Mountain.

They logged part of the old-growth Douglas fir a couple of years ago, as part of a small-scale salvage licence. I'm not really sure what rate they paid on the stumpage, but it was pretty good wood — 200-year-old Douglas fir sold for pulp and plywood. As a woodworker I love fir; it's a great wood.

It seemed like a bit of a waste, so I thought I'd do something about it. I kind of made a map, made a little presentation, got the Ministry of Environment interested. It was just very obvious, the wildlife values to this hill. Then it was laid out to be logged, quite a bit of it, by Canfor. Due to my efforts they put a halt to the logging for now in some of the areas, primarily because it was fir dominant and they are still targeting pine, although they do log a lot of fir still.

We held off the logging for a little bit. It's just really concerning, when we talk about opening up more areas to logging, that places like this, these last little places are going to be…. Am I going to have any chance to get some kind of protection for this, when we're talking about logging what's left? I don't think so.

It's a little bit discouraging. I hope that we realize that
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what we've done, what we've logged in the last 30 years…. I don't know how you can call that sustainable. What's the future going to log? What are the future sawmillers or woodworkers or loggers going to rely on? In this area I see that is going to happen everywhere else around Prince George.

I don't think we should open up what's left to logging. I think we should actually talk about protecting what's left. I don't see the future in opening up whatever hasn't been logged to more logging. It just doesn't make sense to me.

The other point I wanted to touch on, because I'm probably close to the end of my speech, is the herbicide-spraying issue. Out towards my way, it's probably the most heavily sprayed place in the province.

We got some numbers from Canfor. B.C. Timber Sales hasn't provided us with the numbers, but Canfor has provided numbers showing, in that area of the map I showed you, that they spray 25 percent of everything that's logged by helicopter with six litres per hectare of glyphosate, which is an incredibly high amount. That's the legal limit. It's toxic to frogs at three litres, and we spray 25 percent of every hectare that's logged. That's not 25 percent of every block gets sprayed. It's 25 percent of every hectare gets sprayed, which is to say that we're very close to eliminating 90 percent of all the aspen that would grow there.

Aspen are a very important component of the forest out there. The stuff that's logged had a high aspen component. When you cut it, you cut the aspen and they pile it in piles. Aspen likes to grow when you cut it, so they're just making the problem worse by the method of harvesting. To deal with that they go in and spray it, and it just decimates everything. Everything is dead once they spray it.

I'll pull up this map again. These coloured areas are the blocks that have been sprayed in five years. I'm missing a couple of years, so I think it's probably more like 80 percent of these blocks get some kind of spraying.

I don't know if that makes any sense, but the different colours are for different years, and that is what's been sprayed, so quite a bit, and that doesn't include 2009 or 2008. It doesn't include B.C. Timber Sales, who spray….

To me aspen, I think, are a very important part of the development of our forests. They access nutrition in the soil that conifers can't access. They cycle those nutrients to conifers through their litter. They reduce the severity of forest fires. If you have aspen forests across the landscape, you can create breaks in the severity of your spread of forest fires.

There has been some preliminary research done around 100 Mile House that shows that when you have aspen in a pine forest, the insect infestation rates are lower. Some of the research is coming out of UBC, by Suzanne Simard. She studied a bunch of failed pine forests, 30-year-old plantations, and wherever there was aspen, they had a lower rate of insect infestation.

Here we are. We're killing these species. We're making our forests less diverse. We're creating monocultures of pine. Nicholas Coops out of UBC did a study, and he argues that pine aren't going to be able to live in their current environment in 80 years, once the climate warms. I used to plant 100 percent pine on some of these blocks. It's a little questionable, this whole thing.

I've worked with aspen. It's not a bad wood. A lot of furniture shops in Vancouver work with aspen. They import it all from the States. We've got this local resource, and we don't use it. Maybe we need to look at including aspen in the mix of species that are commercially viable.

That's actually one of the reasons why Prince George is one of the places that sprays most heavily. The simple reason that aspen aren't considered under the…. Whatever the chief forester declares as being a commercially viable species, aspen aren't on that list. Maybe we should look at including them on a list, and we could not spray so much.

Bulkley Valley — they don't spray herbicides. In a lot of places they used to. They don't anymore, and their forest industry hasn't collapsed, as a lot of people would attempt to say.

I think part of what we're looking at here…. We really need to analyze the free-growing standards, really look at why we want to insist on these monocultures of pine, primarily, around here. I think we need to move more towards mixed forests, diversify the types of species that our mills rely on and set aside reserves. I don't think we can log everything.

I think we need to look at creating more parks. There hasn't been a park or a reserved area created in my area for 30 years. In the meantime we've logged it all, and what's left is about to be logged.

I'd urge everybody here to consider the limited future that our forest has around here in terms of providing jobs for the future. We can't rob Peter to pay Paul, as they say. We've got to leave something for the future generations. That’s about it.

J. Rustad (Chair): Thank you very much for that. One quick comment about parks. It's interesting. You mentioned that there hasn't been a new park in the area in 30 years, but across the province over the last 12 years or so we've gone from about 6 or 7 percent of our land base to about 15 percent of our land base in park status.

Having said that, we've got time for just one question, which will be from Harry.

H. Bains: James, thank you very much for the presentation, and thank you for the passion that you bring before this committee about the issues that you mentioned.

I want to talk to you about the spray issue. During the break, you mentioned that there might be an act or legislation that requires the licence holders to grow certain species, or take action to eliminate others or suppress others through sprays.
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Can you be more specific on what legislation that is and what that actually means?

J. Steidle: The forest and range acts — I forget exactly which section — require the tenure holder to make sure that a commercially viable species is the dominant species on the place that they log. Then it goes down to regional decisions about what they call a commercial species.

In Fort St. John, where there is a lot of aspen and they have an industry that processes aspen, it's a commercial species, so they don't have to go around and spray it all.

It's a regional decision as to what's a commercial species or not. In Prince George they don't consider aspen a commercial species, even though it grows naturally and is a huge component of the natural forest.

B. Routley: I was interested in your comments regarding the sustainable use of forest products. I heard one environmental activist suggest that two of the biggest problems the planet faces are poverty and the burning of fossil fuels.

I'm sure you're aware that carbon is actually stored when you make lumber and you put it in houses and people live in them. It's a better storage of carbon than building a cement house, for example, or a steel building. The scientists generally agree that there are other building materials that are even more harmful or potentially toxic to the planet.

You said about protecting what was left. I mean, the problem with dead pine is you've also got the problem of entire communities at risk due to fire. Matters are made worse as a result of dead pine that potentially creates a fire load that could run a really hot fire.

I just wondered if you had any…. I mean, there's no question that there's been aggressive harvesting all over the region. The idea was to get back to green and plant some forests that were going to help the environment in the future. I just wondered if you had any feelings one way or the other about intensive forest management or replanting these lands and that kind of thing.

J. Steidle: Well, the kinds of places that I'm most interested in seeing set aside are still the green areas. All the pine has been pretty effectively logged out there, and what is left are primarily Douglas fir–dominant stands that aren't dead, that have been there for a couple hundred years. There are trees in this one area that are 500 years old. It's the northern range of the Douglas fir, and it's a beautiful area.

I think we have to understand that there are other values to the forest other than just logging. That said, I work with wood all the time. I understand the need for logging. I use wood every day. I'm not saying that there shouldn't be any logging or something.

I think most of what I'm trying to argue is that from an economic perspective we need to slow down and manage these resources with a little more care, for future generations. We've logged 80 percent of the trees out there in 30 years. I don't see how that's going to provide future generations with wood to log. A lot of that's been spruce that wasn't dead. Even in the last couple years, this past winter, they logged a big block of 80-year-old Douglas fir that was totally healthy. Yet there's still dead pine everywhere that needs to be logged, and here we're still logging green stuff.

J. Rustad (Chair): We're out of time, but I want to thank you very much for your presentation. Anything else that you decide you may want to provide for the committee, please feel free to submit it before July 20.

J. Rustad (Chair): Our next group is Sinclar Group, Lakeland Mills, with Bruce McLean and Greg Stewart.

G. Stewart: All right. Good morning, and thank you again for another opportunity to present to this committee. As I was last time, I'm joined by Bruce McLean, our senior woods manager. He is here to answer all the tough questions.

My name is Greg Stewart. I'm the president of Sinclar Group Forest Products and, by association, then, as well, the president of Lakeland Mills. I want to give a brief description around Sinclar Group in terms of the scope of the operations that we do have within our group of companies.

We are a third-generation family business, and Sinclar Group represents the ownership of the Andersen and Stewart family holdings. Within our group we own Apollo Forest Products in Fort St. James and their subsidiary. We have a joint venture with Nak'azdli First Nation, which is the Tl'oh Forest Products. You heard a presentation from them yesterday.

We own 67 percent of Lakeland Mills, Winton Global Lumber and Winton Global Homes, which is a panellized-home manufacturer located here in Prince George. We own 50 percent of L&M Lumber, Nechako, Premium Pellet and Nechako Green Energy, based in Vanderhoof. The sawmills manufacture stud lumber, and the value-added facilities allow us to capture additional value from the fibre we touch.

Today's comments will focus primarily on Lakeland and a brief discussion around Winton Global Lumber.

Before I jump into the background on Lakeland, I would like to acknowledge the employees that were in-
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jured in the tragic fire on April 23. As of last week, all employees have been released and have returned to Prince George. While hospital stays have ceased, medical treatment continues. It's a long road to recovery for our employees, but we're glad they are now able to recover at home.

The incident has taken an enormous toll on the families. The overwhelming community support that we have received has helped all employees and their families manage through a very difficult time.

Lakeland has been in operation since 1973. The mill has undergone significant renovations and improvements over the past three decades to maximize the value and the lumber volume from each log we process. Lakeland, which employs 160 people, has an annual harvest volume, tied directly to the mill, of 200,000 cubic metres per year. Meanwhile, on the three shifts, we require approximately 750,000 cubic metres per year.

In the last year and a half, in addition to the sawlogs for the sawmills, we have sold 115,000 cubic metres of pulpwood. We've conducted in-bush chipping with both full trees and residuals, providing 25,000 ODts of chips and 9,000 ODts of hog fuel. Also, we have chip-pulp logs at our mill site, the equivalent of 43,000 cubic metres of chips and 16,000 cubic metres of hog fuel. All this material was sold to pulp mills and pellet producers in the local area.

In 1985 we installed our energy system, allowing us to capture the heating value of our residuals to dry our lumber. We've been doing bioenergy before it was called bioenergy. Since then we've installed energy systems in all of our lumber mills.

Lakeland has also established relationships with local pellet manufacturers and UNBC to supply their bioenergy needs. Also, as we've heard just in the previous presentation from Mayor Green, we've recently started supplying heat from our energy system to the city of Prince George district energy system.

Last year Sinclar Group made the decision to permanently close Winton Global Lumber. One of the reasons we decided to close the mill was to preserve the timber supply for our other mills. Winton Global had a volume of 500,000 cubic metres. As we looked at our operations and evaluated the future timber supply, we realized that we would have to rationalize our mills. When considering what it would take to compete in the years to come, it became apparent that making the Winton timber available for our other mills was the sustainable choice. This was a tough but necessary decision that we had to make.

When it comes to Lakeland, we are optimistic about our ability to rebuild. We have a committed workforce, both in the plant and the woods. We have longtime local owners who remain committed to the communities. We have strong partnerships with the city of Prince George, UNBC, logging contractors, residual customers, etc. Also, we believe our currently available fibre will support a new mill.

That said, there are three factors that have yet to be determined that could have a detrimental impact on the decision to rebuild: first, the outcome of the WorkSafe B.C. investigation; second, the outcome and settlement from the insurance investigation; and finally, the outcome of this process.

When making the decision about a new mill, we need to consider the fibre volume available, the quality of that fibre, and the cost to deliver and process. Recognizing that harvest levels will decline, we are estimating future harvest levels, including mid-term licence harvest levels and overall fibre supply in the region. Hopefully, the process currently underway will help provide certainty with respect to the reductions. Significant changes to the existing processes that will require long implementation times will impact the timing and level of investment.

Currently, all replaceable licences within Sinclar Group are volume-based. It is my understanding that volume-based licences were initially granted to promote the development of the forest industry. Today we find ourselves in a different situation.

The timber supply area is effectively a large area-based tenure. Different licences have been developed to manage the cut, including NRFLs, replaceable volume-based tenures, etc. The mix of these different licences makes it difficult to implement area-based tenures across the P.G. TSA. The challenge in doing this is ensuring that the existing mills are able to access the right volume and the right quality at the right cost. The mills' competitiveness must be maintained.

One of the challenges of allocating area-based tenures at this time is the fibre quality. Ideally, the conversion to area-based tenures would happen at a time when the overall fibre quality is not so severely impacted as it is today as a result of the mountain pine beetle epidemic. This would provide the licensees with the opportunity to deploy their own mitigation strategies to address infestations and do so with their businesses' long-term future in mind.

The process of reallocating volume-based tenures to achieve the appropriate pine-leading stands within the P.G. TSA took over a year. To identify and redistribute timber under an area-based model would take much longer, as determining the areas to be harvested has a direct impact on the profitability of the mills — even more so than redistributing volume-based tenures. The length of time required for this process would present significant challenges to our ability to decide on a future rebuild of the Lakeland mill.

As an independent operator, our business model requires developing strong business partnerships to maximize fibre utilization and extraction. The infrastructure developed by the primary industry should be utilized to
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capture additional value from our land base. As mentioned before, we have worked with our fibre customers to do in-woods chipping and on-site whole-log chipping. We have provided residuals to UNBC and are leveraging installed equipment to provide heat to the city of Prince George.

Additional value can be extracted from timber, but it requires stakeholders to develop relationships and partnerships. The mentality must shift from getting the biggest piece of the pie to growing the overall pie. These partnerships could reduce costs or minimize risks. In the case of Lakeland, by working with our stakeholders, the economically available fibre may increase. Strong business-to-business relationships must be encouraged.

To sum up this presentation, the conditions for rebuilding Lakeland appear favourable, but the final decision will be dependent on WorkSafe insurance and, in part, the outcome of this committee. While the values, principles and recommendations that I presented yesterday in Fort St. James apply to Lakeland, we believe that developing strong business-to-business relationships, rooted in success for all parties, is an efficient way to maximize the fibre basket.

Thank you for this opportunity to speak today. I'll now turn it over to you for questions.

H. Bains: Thank you again for a very good presentation, and thank you for doing what you're doing in the community as far as the cooperation and partnership that exists in Fort St. James and other communities. It could be seen as a model.

Two questions. One is on your timber supply as it exists today compared to your consumption in all of the mills, including if and when Lakeland is built. What ratio do you have? Is it self-sufficient, or is your consumption higher than the timber that you have?

The second question maybe I could put there as well: how could the WCB investigation be a factor in determining whether a new mill is built or not?

G. Stewart: To answer your first questions with respect to the fibre supply that we do have, I mentioned yesterday that at Apollo we have approximately 200,000 cubic metres of replaceable volume tenure. We have 200,000 at Lakeland and 500,000 at Winton. The one operation that I haven't spoken about is Vanderhoof, and they have approximately 46,000. It's a very small volume-based replaceable tenure that they have there.

When you take a look at our organizations as a whole, we require just over two million cubic metres of fibre to keep it properly stocked. So we are on the market looking for other fibre, essentially...

G. Stewart: : …about 50 percent. Then we're looking to secure about 50 percent in other locations, either through partnerships with some of our industry partners — with First Nations and working with BCTS — around some of the volumes that come available there.

H. Bains: The WCB investigation — how is that a factor in determining whether a mill is built or not?

G. Stewart: First and foremost, no one wants to go through a tragic event like what we've had at Lakeland. Our employees really are our families, and we respect them as families. This has been an absolutely devastating event for us.

For us to go back and build another mill without understanding what the root cause was…. Of first and foremost concern, we want to know what caused that incident and make sure that we find ways to engineer that out of the process so that we have an extremely safe mill. So that's one aspect.

There are other aspects with the WorkSafe process. While I anticipate that everything is proceeding as would be expected, there are some ongoing financial potential liabilities that could result from WorkSafe. I do not anticipate those, but that said, that is a risk that exists out there.

First and foremost is on the root cause and making sure that we understand that so we can make sure that's engineered out of the system.

B. Stewart: Thanks very much, Greg. You talked about the Sinclar Group and the fact that it's third generation. Obviously, the history of the families involved in this has been very much long term, looking at building for future generations. You just made a comment about volume-based tenure and the difficulty in trying to make this change to area-based management.

I guess, from what little we've heard about it, it sounds to me like area-based management provides a greater level of certainty in the long term for producers that are taking logs out of the timber supply areas. Is it something that you support? If you do support it, what are your suggestions as to how we might move to that to be able to redistribute renewable volume-based timber tenures?

G. Stewart: I think, conceptually, they make a lot of sense, area-based tenures, and I've had previous conversations to that effect before. Today, given the fibre situation, I think we have a challenge ahead of us.

While I think that there are areas within TSAs where area-based may make sense, there are certain areas — in particular, the operating areas that we have today — where I think it would be very, very difficult to imple-
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ment. By continuing to work in that volume-based environment in our operating areas, I think we have the opportunity to try and maximize that fibre by working with all the other stakeholders and building those partnerships like we've done before.

B. Stewart: So is that saying that it can't be done or that you just don't know the solution as to how we'd get there over a period of time?

G. Stewart: I certainly don't know the solution as to how we'd get up there over a period of time. I think there are some challenges, again, with the number of volume-based tenures that exist in our operating areas. I certainly think that area-based tenures probably can be implemented in different regions within TSAs and within different TSAs. I'm just looking at our particular operating areas and saying that implementation of that is extremely difficult.

J. Rustad (Chair): Okay, thank you for that. I'm just going to do one quick follow-up question and then give the last question to Norm. That is around the area base. Do you think one of the options could be to manage…? As you say, there are a number of licensees, and they're scattered, and how the cells are in this area makes that a very challenging prospect. Is there an opportunity to look at a group-management model for an area base?

G. Stewart: I think so, but to some extent…. That is essentially what you're getting back down into — smaller regions of a volume-based type of tenures — as you have multiple licensees working together on an area base. Essentially, you're prescribing volume-based tenures within that area for those licensees. That's the way I kind of perceive that.

N. Macdonald (Deputy Chair): You'd be surprised how many of the presentations are more worried about us doing something wrong than actually seeing the possibilities. I think what you're giving us is caution too, on the movement to area-based tenures. It's not necessarily something that would work everywhere, and I take that point. I think you probably could expand on some of the First Nations interests in any change as well, because I'm sure that they would be participating if there was a move to area-based.

The question I have goes to the complete fibre picture for you. How much of the fibre beyond what you have licence for…? Do you depend upon B.C. Timber Sales? Do you depend on buying regionally? Do you have a sense of how far your area of interest extends — how far west, how far south, how far east?

B. McLean: When we looked at…. We constantly look at fibre forecasting. We expand to the west up into Mackenzie, because we recognize that where the wood flows today is for all the consumption in the region. Quesnel takes wood out of this area. Wood from Mackenzie is going down to Quesnel. Not so much from the west line. So we look regionally as far as fibre supply, and as Greg said, all the opportunities with partnerships, through small business sales, First Nations, whatever.

All the licensees are going through the same thing. We have replaceable volume. What are we going to have in the mid-term? What's going to be the overall demand, and what's the overall fibre availability that all of us have to have access to? Part of what drives the rationalization is the reality that there isn't enough overall volume, and even within the range of what mitigation you can come up with for ramping down the allowable cut…. We recognize there is going to be a rationalization.

Remember, part of rationalization is improving the productivity of existing mills. If everything is status quo, there is still going to be increased consumption in some of the mills. In order to remain competitive, you've got to keep driving the efficiencies and getting as much value as you can.

J. Rustad (Chair): Thank you very much. We're out of time, but I'd like Eric to ask a question. Perhaps you could consider it as part of a written submission to us down the road.

E. Foster: Very quickly. Today's market. If you're going out to buy logs tomorrow, how far could you go to get pure-grade Douglas fir? Right now how far away could you go to get it and bring it to your mill?

B. McLean: Pure grade? That's not one that's…. Let's just say a premium sawlog.

B. McLean: Again, it's very dependent on the quality. At the risk of narrowing it down to just a number…. I would say you're limited. You could probably marginally pull it out of Mackenzie. Realistically, even going for…. Because we're directed west, bringing wood from Fort St. James to Prince George, which we've done…. That's almost…. Well, it is. It's uneconomical. You're stretching way beyond the….

Thank you very much for your time, and I also want to thank you for what you've been able to do for the workers and the families through this tragic situation.
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J. Rustad (Chair): My apologies to other presenters, as we have gone over. I'm going to be a little bit more strict in terms of the times and questions, just as a note to members.

D. King: Good morning, and thanks for allowing me to make a presentation here. Just a little background. I'm now retired, but I was the habitat protection section head with Ministry of Environment here for almost 30 years. In that capacity, protection of fish and wildlife habitat was the primary objective and function of the position.

In that role I was involved in everything from timber supply reviews down to cutting permits. Probably two-thirds of the job involved direct work with the forest industry and the forest service.

The first thing I would like to comment on is actually your process that you've got here. You have a committee that's basically looking at the mid-term wood supply. I would suggest that you should also be very concerned about long-term timber supply simply because the supplies that are determined through the TSR process here…. I think there's a fairly significant fault in the projections from the TSR process, and I would suggest that the volumes projected for the future — mid-term, six million; long-term, something over nine million — are probably rather questionable. The reason I say that is that the TSR determinations do not take into consideration climatic changes and warming to any extent whatsoever.

When I was in my job, I raised that with the chief forester. For the latest one for the Prince George timber supply area, I made a presentation there also. It was about a year and a half, two years ago, when it came out. I was again told basically the same thing.

The TSRs are based on, basically, what has happened, what's on the land base, and is not really taking into consideration the climatic factors whatsoever. I would suggest that if the climatic changes, the warming that is going on, continue, we will probably end up with some more, very serious health impacts on our forests out there. We've had spruce beetle in the past. It could be resurrected. We've got budworm. We've got hemlock looper. These are the ones that have been out there to small degrees in the past, but I would suggest that they — and, maybe, other things that we don't even know about yet — are almost certain to affect it.

Sort of related to the whole timber supply process — and it's something that James Steidle raised — is that forest practices, the silviculture practices, really haven't changed to accommodate the changing climate. What you've got is still a lot of pine being planted. Whether or not that'll ever get to be harvested is a really moot point, simply because of the changing climate. There are experts at UNBC and elsewhere that certainly, I think, could add a lot more to that.

It's very nice to look at possible uplifts in the wood supply to meet the shortcomings that are projected, but I would suggest that there are other, rather more serious, issues that need to be looked at in terms of the long-term wood supply — very serious issues.

I'd like to go through and just comment on some of the mitigation scenarios that have been raised in your background papers and so on. I'll comment on each one.

One of them that really alarms me is consideration of the elimination of the Prince George old-growth order and the associated old-growth management areas. This order is based on really good science. It's not perfect, but it is based on pretty good science. Forest companies were involved in its development, and in fact, it provides a very good basis for the long-term management of not only the forests and wood fibre but all other resources that are out there on that forest and land base, from the biodiversity values to tourism, wildlife, recreation — the whole gamut of things.

To take that away, to take the Prince George old-growth order away, and the old-growth management areas, I would suggest, would have a very serious impact on the long-term well-being of our forest. Those old-growth areas really, in a way, provide sort of a buffer, almost, to the climatic-change factors that are occurring and that are projected to occur across the province, and the Prince George old-growth order is certainly far better than the provincial old-growth order.

I would suggest that the Prince George type of old-growth order should be applied to all of the TSAs and TFLs across the province, not just the Prince George one. If you want more information on that order and the science behind it, then I suggest you get Craig DeLong, who is a real guru of the process in the district here, to come and speak to the committee at some point.

Just one little point. With regard to the order, I'll just mention that I've got two or three others in my written presentation. Old growth, for the ICH cedar-leading types, is described as about 250 years old, or 250- plus years as being old growth. With old-growth cedar, that's really sort of a sapling in the life cycle of a cedar, and in reality, it should be at least double that. Probably 600 or 800 years old should be what is described as old growth for cedar.

There are a number of non-spatial old-growth management areas that were scattered through the Prince George and adjacent TSAs, and I would suggest that some of those should also be converted over to be legally described as spatial old-growth management areas, especially those that are in the ICH cedar-leading stands east of Prince George.

Visual-quality objectives have been looked at as a possible source of additional wood for an uplift. They are
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largely a social value, and to a large degree they arose from the LRMP process. I was directly involved in that LRMP process over a number of years. Most of the committees went from three to five years.

I would strongly suggest that tinkering with those is not a good idea. In fact, the LRMPs probably should be resurrected to have input into that process. They had a much broader, public involvement in those processes than I think you're going to get from this committee, and I would strongly recommend that you seek a much broader input if you're going to play with visual-quality objectives.

Ungulate winter range. The deer winter ranges I have not been involved in. They've evolved mostly since I retired. However, the mountain caribou winter ranges that are now… This is the protection for the mountain caribou.

I oversaw the development of those in the 1980s. They've been included in the TSR since about 1990. When they were rolled over into gazetted protected areas recently, they had actually a very low impact on both the Prince George and Robson areas simply because they had been included as deletions from the timber-harvested land base going back to around 1990.

Riparian management reserves have also been mentioned. It scares me that you should be even considering them. They're not perfect. I was involved in the negotiations over those through the 1970s, '80s and '90s, and I don't think there is a biologist out there that would not say that they're a little less than adequate. In fact, if they were in place strictly from a water and fisheries management perspective, they'd probably be capturing 50 to 100 percent more forest land area than they currently do.

Not only are they important for the water and fish resources but they also are very important from a wildlife and biodiversity reason simply because it tends to be sort of wetter lands, and it's some of the richest lands that are on the entire landscape. Wildlife tree patches fall into much the same category.

One thing that's not mentioned at all is coarse woody debris. There are legal requirements under FRPA, and it goes back to the Forest Practices Code for the amount of coarse woody debris. The only reason I mention that is that with the onset of bioenergy and the desire to capture more of this coarse woody debris off the cutblocks, the standards or the requirements for coarse woody debris on cutblocks is so low that it would be almost a joke.

I would make a very strong recommendation that before there are huge commitments to the bioenergy sector, that the coarse woody debris standards be revisited and substantially upgraded. Leaving a few sticks of small-diameter coarse debris left on a cutblock just doesn't cut the cake.

Parks have been considered as a possible source of additional wood fibre also. I was directly involved in the establishment of mostly new parks throughout northeastern B.C. I was on the protected area committee that identified potential protected areas in the early '90s. They were vetted through the LRMP process, and with a few minor boundary changes here and there, most of these areas from here to the Yukon border did become provincial parks and became part of the quota for the province.

Each district had quotas for the amount of parkland to be identified, and mostly it worked all right. However, there is an odd district which had complex biosystems where it was inadequate. One of those is the Prince George forest district, and what I'm intending to do here is just make you aware of a new park proposal that a few of us have been working on now for a couple of years out east of here. This is in the Ancient Forest Trail area about halfway to McBride in the ICH cedar-leading stands.

Perhaps Darwyn Coxson will speak more to it later this morning. I did not have a chance in preparing this talk over the last couple of days to talk with him, so we are not coordinated on this. But he and I and a few others have been working on this. It's an area centred on the Ancient Forest Trail, which some of you may have heard about. Many of you haven't.

It's a trail that the Caledonia Ramblers Hiking Club started. It opened in about 2006. It has become a highly attractive area. Last year there were about 10,000 visitors to the trail. It is now on the list of 100 sights to see in B.C. It's a major attraction for tourism, both local and foreigners. Its growth is just growing rapidly.

We see this as having a high potential. The area, in addition to that, has very high ecological values in that it has a variety of plant species, particularly lichens, that are found there and in two or three other places in the world. UNBC staff feel that it should be a world heritage site, and I'm sure that Darwyn will talk about more of that a little later.

I'm not going to walk up and show the map that's in my presentation, but the area we're looking at right at this moment is about 160 square kilometres from the Fraser River up to the top of Driscoll Ridge, from the existing Slim Creek Provincial Park westward for about 20 kilometres. Within it, we're looking for a park.

We've done considerable timber analysis on the area already. It contains a number of old-growth management areas, spatial and non-spatial, and we are working on that. Certain people in the Forest Service and Parks branch are more than aware of this, as are the regional district staff locally here and so on.

Anyways, in sort of conclusion, I would certainly hope that you will think long and hard before making any decisions about going into the old-growth management areas and deleting that Prince George biodiversity order. I think it has a potential for very serious impacts in the long term on forests, forest management and so on. I would suggest that those decisions will really spell
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out what you leave behind for your children and grandchildren.

N. Macdonald (Deputy Chair): Thank you for coming here, and thanks for the expertise that you bring to the discussion. I take your point, again, on some of the cautions around some of the proposals here.

I just wanted to talk about coarse woody debris. Ben Parfitt did a paper that talked about what he described as missed opportunity that's left in the bush. We've also heard anecdotally that the government has struggled to put together overlapping tenures so that we can go in and get some of the opportunity that's there, recognizing that of course there is a need for coarse woody debris.

Now, presumably you're out on the land quite a bit. It is your sense or is it not your sense that while we need to leave coarse woody debris, there is an opportunity to perhaps go and get some more? Or do you have a different experience?

D. King: The traditional sort of harvesting around here has left probably more coarse woody debris on cutblocks than the law requires at this time, with very few exceptions.

What worries me is that the standards required under FRPA are so low that if…. Of course, there is opportunity out there — to answer your question directly. Yes, I would say that there is some opportunity, but I feel that before that opportunity is exercised then the standards and the amount of coarse woody debris that should be left on there has to be raised. It's just too low to meet ecological needs out there for small mammals, for soil and these kinds of things.

N. Macdonald (Deputy Chair): So as we work to figure out how to do the overlapping tenures — and I think we're along that road — just to be mindful of the fact that we need to really think through the amount of coarse woody debris that stays.

N. Macdonald (Deputy Chair): I take that point, but there's still opportunity you feel.

J. Rustad (Chair): Dave, thank you very much for your presentation. I know there are a couple of other people that would have liked to have asked some questions, but we are out of time.

Our next presenter is Mike Johnson with McMillan Creek Farmers and Women's Institute of P.G. Mike, over to you.

M. Johnson: I brought you a letter here. I'm just talking about what we've been working at for the last little while in consultation with the community forest expansion in the area — primarily in Prince George.

I'm not very good a public speaking, but we'll see if we can get through this. A letter from McMillan Creek Farmers and Women's Institute of Prince George.

"The forests that are attached to the ADA lands are necessary for the viability of the future of the farm unit by providing the following assets:

"Clean air. Forest vegetation converts carbon dioxide to oxygen, providing quality air for us to breathe as well as providing carbon sequestration.

"Clean water and water retention. The living forest floor acts as a filter. The snowmelt and rain passes through the soil into the aquifer and then into freshwater springs and water wells, providing drinking water. Surface melt and precipitation trickle through the forest, eventually reaching streams and creeks. The forest canopy slows the water flow, providing continued water supply throughout the spring, summer and fall, which aids in the prevention of soil erosion, as well as providing some flood reduction for the city of Prince George and downstream communities.

"Soil fertility. The standing forest and vegetation provide mobilization for micro- and macro-nutrients from subsoils into the topsoil layer on an annual basis, building soils for the future farmer. Naturally, decomposition of dead leaves, dead needles and plant fibre builds layers of topsoil which will aid the future farmer. Forests provide natural windbreak protection and shading, increasing the humidity while preventing dehydration of the soils and vegetation.

"Manageable timber provides a renewable resource for the farm unit, thereby enhancing the local economy in somewhat sustained forest management practices — revenue to develop and help maintain the future farm unit. Waste wood provides heat for the winter for the urban farmers. Area-based tenures on ADA lands would have detrimental effects on agriculture in the region by loss of revenue to the farmer. Clearcut logging would remove sustainable assets and revenue reserves, impeding the development of the existing future farm unit.

"Garbage dumping. Violators would be able to contaminate precious topsoils, subsoils, surface water and the aquifer. The West Beaverly timber sale licence 80770is a prime example of what comes with area-based tenures located in close proximity to cities and urban development. Providing this close access for violators has resulted in the dumping of many old vehicles, furniture, household garbage, oil containers, tires, pallets, fridges, stoves, etc.

"Erosion. Fertile topsoil needed for agricultural purposes erodes quickly when snowmelt is unrestricted. Noxious weed infestations spread rapidly without standing forest providing windbreaks. Standing forest provides a natural buffer, impeding the spread of non-native and native noxious weed species alike. Premature clearcutting in a poorly prescribed manner would only accelerate the spread of this problem.

"As far as the fire hazard that has been talked about, the fire suppression 100 courses clearly state that 95 percent of all wildfires are caused by people. Therefore, if access roads are made without being affixed to farms, we have a very high risk of damage caused by people who would otherwise not be having any access to these spots.

"Availability. Area-based tenure over ADA land would have preference over agriculture, due to the close proximity of local
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timber processing facilities. This would have a great interference on the existing growth and development of farms located within the present ADA areas.

"The food security part of it. Area-based tenures would remove an asset of the present farming community, which in the long run would result in lost food production. McMillan Creek Farmers and Women's Institute highly recommends that we must continue to maintain and enforce the order of the Minister of Agriculture and Lands under section 93.4 of the Land Act, dated November 21, for areas within the Prince George forest district and that no area-based tenures will be established within these agricultural development areas.

"As far as volume-based tenures, we hope that applies too. We must continue to reserve forested ADA lands as a base for the security of our food supply, for the future community and for the future of our province.

"With review of the mid-term timber supply, members of McMillan Creek Farmers and Women's Institute would encourage communication with your board to establish new commerce for the changing future."

N. Macdonald (Deputy Chair): I guess I don't quite understand. You're saying that if we move to area-based tenure, that that would impact present agriculture in the sense that the regime for the private lands wouldn't change? Presumably the agriculture…. Or are you saying that it would change, impact on private lands? It wouldn't. We're talking about impacts on areas where there are, perhaps, grazing rights or things like that. Is that what you're saying?

M. Johnson: No, this is primarily at the ADA lands with the development of the community forest expansion.

M. Johnson: That's what this is. In our recent — well, two years — meeting with them, the prescription of how the application would be…. It would not be in favour of how we would like to see the expansion of farms.

N. Macdonald (Deputy Chair): Okay. So by area-based, you're primarily talking about the community forest expansion in this area rather than area-based tenures in general?

M. Johnson: Well, I can only speak on this area, because I'm not familiar with the rest of them. But the prescribed manner the community forests wanted to…. They looked at the wood that was available there, and they came across all the stuff in the ADA that had no tenure attached to it. That's the wood that they tried to allocate or attain for the community forest expansion. So that's the wood stuff, the supply that I'm referring to.

D. Barnett: Thank you very much for your presentation. I have a question. Are there any grazing leases in this particular piece of land you're talking about? Or is this just for the fact that the kind of farming that is done is not cattle and it's just vegetables and different kinds of agriculture? Or do you have any grazing leases?

D. Barnett: Leases, in and around this particular piece of land that you're concerned about, that they're looking at for the expansion of the community forest?

S. Serup: I find it hard to hear what's being said. Can you hear in the back now?

I've been involved as a logging contractor, mostly in the Mackenzie area, for most of my life. Now I own a woodlot at Norman Lake in the pine area. I was very concerned about this problem with the pine beetle, and I felt that it was not understood by people — the significance of that outbreak.

Some years ago I wrote a letter to Stephen Harper and invited him to come and do a flight over the area that they affected, and he did that. He came and did a flight in a helicopter. Jay Hill, our Member of Parliament, was a logger. He told me afterwards that it seemed clear that the tiny patches of logging going on were totally inadequate to deal with what was happening.

I made a suggestion to Stephen Harper and the federal government that we should log beetle wood and put it into lakes, where it would be kept from deteriorating, and
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that $1 billion a year should be spent. The federal government would supply $500 million and the provincial government $500 million per year. The federal money would all come back when that wood came out of the lake in future years as good-quality timber.

I was told that the federal government was responding to British Columbia's problem by allotting $100 million per year for ten years to deal with the beetle problem. Now, I was quite disturbed that that $100 million that was given to B.C. did not seem to go into mitigating the problem in the forests with some of the things I had suggested and with tending the new other stands so there would be more production, with fertilizer and thinning and this sort of thing.

Instead, it seemed to diversify. We built an airport in Prince George, a bridge at Kamloops and things like that. I believe it should have gone into the forest. There is much area that is not satisfactorily restocked.

There was a big effort when Frank Oberle was our Member of Parliament. He introduced a further program where the province and the federal government worked together to have areas restocked that were not sufficiently restocked. We now have beautiful stands of timber out there that will become available. This sort of thing should be going on right now.

In our woodlot we lost most of the beetle wood at our Norman Lake division. We have a division at Summit Lake that I was able to acquire by picking up an old forest quota. Up there, there's a mix of Douglas fir, spruce and pine.

We had difficulties selling the beetle wood because of the market conditions, but we have now been doing select logging, and it looks beautiful when we take the pine out and the Douglas fir and spruce, which is quite spaced. I'm hoping that there'll be increased growth in the area for greenwood.

One area of that woodlot in the Summit Lake area is visible from the lake, so it's off-limits for logging, as I see it, because somebody could be out there in a boat fishing, and they might see a clearcut in the distance. I think it's a very foolish idea that you can leave old, dying trees so the tourists will be happy. I'm not sure they will be happy. It should be done away with, that policy.

I remember going up from Prince Rupert to Skagway, and much of that panhandle the Americans had put off-limits for logging, I believe. You see a monotonous stand of greenwood. I would have more interest in seeing a logging operation, timber being put in the salt chuck and tugboats towing it away. It's a foolish idea to waste stands of timber for that reason.

The old growth is a blight on our land. It's a desert. It's been done away with in most other countries. New Zealand and Scandinavia have done away with that a long time ago, and they have all their forest area in production. This beetle problem could be a blessing in that we might get rid of some of these old-growth stands, and we could have productive forests again.

You'll have to excuse me for rambling a bit. I just found out yesterday afternoon I could be here, so I can't present as concisely as I would like to do.

In our woodlot at Norman Lake we had difficulty with getting cutting permits. We had applied for them and did a lot of work and then found out that we had to go back and do the cruising. We couldn't get someone to do that, and then all of a sudden the market collapsed. Now we have a big area with small pine that is still sitting there. Because it's still sitting there, there's no new forest being planted, and that's the problem with our stands.

If the minute you get rid of it, you're planting, then it's production again. I believe our annual allowable cut should not go down. It should go up. It should concentrate on getting rid of the old-growth stands, and then we should go into thinning, select logging, because we will need the wood.

In Scandinavia 25 percent of their volume comes from thinning. I visited a forest in Denmark some years ago. They cut 11 cubic metres per hectare per year in the forest I visited — 11 cubic metres per year. In the Prince George area we are allowed to cut 2.63 cubic metres per year. Now, it doesn't make sense that on this land in Prince George, which is the same land, you could not produce more than a quarter of what they can in that forest in Denmark. We may be a colder climate, and they are at a lower elevation but within….

It's not just my words. The Peel Commission came out in 1991 and showed different scenarios for tending our forests. Intensive forestry, improved silviculture and shelterwood stands would give us a huge increase in the annual allowable cut, to the tune of…. Right there you would pick up 50 percent over what you have now. There's no reason in the world why we couldn't go ahead and do that.

The Peel Commission came out at a time when the Social Credit government lost power and the NDP came in. It was not dealt with. When the Liberals came in, they didn't deal with it. The Peel Commission suggested that 50 percent of the timber should be available on the open market. This would help Lakeland Mills be sufficient to stay in there and get the timber supply, and it would do away with the problem of the dispute with the Americans — if the Peel Commission had been dealt with. We paid taxpayers' money for the Peel Commission to sit for two years, and we did not respond to what they recommended.

I feel that if we were to…. Now, the thing that's helping us is that the shelf life of the pine is much longer than most people had expected. We are shipping the dead pine to Quesnel now, and they're very happy to take it. It has been dead for five years. But they told me that we are now cutting wood in our mill that was killed by the beetles in 1995, so that's 17 years. Now, we did not save our wood
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and put it in the lake. But now we find out there's a long shelf life, which is helpful to us.

I expect we can cut beetle wood for many years to come and then old growth and after that, in the short term, we can go into thinning our young stands. We have young stands, about 200 hectares in our woodlot, that is now about 30 years old, and I expect in 20 years we might go in and commercial thin. That would help us with the allowable cut in our woodlot, which will be reduced, of course, because of the beetle.

I think I had more marked down that I wanted to say, but I'll stop there because I have problems remembering what I wanted to say. Thank you.

J. Rustad (Chair): Svend, thank you very much. I'll open it to questions for a second, but I just want to remind you that for the other comments you may think about afterwards, the committee does accept written submissions through to July 20. So if you would like to send something else in to the committee that you may think about afterwards, please feel free to do that.

I've just got one question with regard to the woodlot licence that you have. How much of an impact does the pine beetle…? Was your woodlot licence primarily pine, or was it a mix of species?

S. Serup: We were awarded a woodlot licence in the upper Norman Lake, in the pine stands. We had a small amount of big, old veterans. In fact, we logged them out. Actually, they went to a smaller stand, and in three or four years there was nothing left. But we were able to acquire 210 hectares in the Summer Lake area, and that's sort of keeping us alive because there will now be an annual allowable cut in the future. I don't know if that answers your question.

The problem I have is that the minute you cut logs and get rid of the wood, with the market conditions and everything else, then you don't get planted. That's where we have to be. We have to get that back in production.

J. Rustad (Chair): Okay. Svend, thank you very much for your presentation today.

D. Coxson: Thanks for allowing me to speak to your committee today. I was one of the founding faculty members at UNBC when we were teaching out of a basement in the downtown here, and I've seen our institution develop over that time period. Throughout that time I've worked on old forests and organisms, plants and animals that depend on old forests. A lot of that work has been in the wet forest east of Prince George, which I want to focus on a lot today.

We're really lucky in this part of the world. We have such incredible biological diversity. When my colleagues from Europe or other parts of the world visit, they can't believe all the different ecosystems I have right on my doorstep. I can go out and collect plants that…. There are only three or four localities in all of Europe. So we really have an incredible heritage here.

The topic that I'd like to talk about is old-growth management areas. I've been working with various ministry offices, with licensees in terms of ensuring that forest management practices are complementary to designation of old-growth management areas.

I guess if I had one take-home message, it would be that one-size-fits-all is not the solution we need. There are incredible differences even within the Prince George district here, from the dry plateau where we have one type of old-growth management area to the wet mountains to our east, where it's very different.

Of course, the interior plateau where the pine beetle impact has been greatest is where we've had a lot of our focus. The old-growth management areas in there tend to be aspatial. It's a requirement for a certain amount of old forest in the landscape. But we understand that that location may change over time. Even before the mountain pine beetle outbreak, that was the case. With harvesting, with fires, as forests age, those high-quality old forest patches need to be in different locations.

The mountain pine beetle outbreak has sort of exacerbated that issue, both for local communities that need timber supply and for plants and animals that need old forests. There probably is a diminished supply available over this mid-term period you're looking at.

I think a key issue to go forward with is to identify where are our high-quality patches for wildlife habitat that we can identify. I wouldn't be surprised if we're already below our targets for old-growth management in the interior plateau, and that's to be expected because of the outbreak. But going forward, I think a high priority should be to ensure that some of the high-quality old forests remain in old-growth management areas to meet those requirements for rare plants and animals and for ungulates, things like migratory birds.

Not all old forests are high-quality habitat, and I think that's an important thing to say. Not all old-growth forests are equal, so my message is not one that they'll have to be set aside.

But I think there's expertise in ministries and there's expertise in universities to distinguish critical areas that are as important for carrying natural communities forward as other areas will be for carrying our economy
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forward.

I was fortunate last week to be sitting at UBC, where there was a series of presentations on climate change, and these were an initiative from Jim Snetsinger, Future Forest Ecosystems Scientific Council. One of the things that came up time and time again, particularly for the southern Interior and the Chilcotin area, is a large expansion in the area of the province that's going to be grassland in 50 to 100 years.

There are different climate scenarios, and you can assume more or less CO₂ emissions or wetter or drier precipitation, but they all showed a huge expansion in the amount of grasslands.

There may be an opportunity for some adaptive management there, to go into some of these sites that are presently forested and manage them for conversion to grassland. You'd have one-time lift in timber supply, but you wouldn't be replanting trees. You'd be managing the sites to create grasslands in the future.

If you don't do that, I think nature is going to do it anyway. You'll have fires in that area, and you may have a real mess. You won't necessarily have a grassland after a fire takes out the trees. You may have invasive weeds. There could be a whole other series of scenarios. But I think there's a silver lining in the climate change cloud, at least in that area, in that grasslands are an important ecosystem in our province. This would have to be done in consultation with local ranchers, communities that value that grassland habitat.

Now I want to switch topics and move to the east of Prince George. When we go into the mountains east of town, it becomes much wetter. My backyard in Prince George was in a new subdivision. If I dig a hole in my backyard, in the forest there I can see layers of charcoal every ten or 15 centimetres. Before we settled the area, there were probably fires here every 70, 80 years in the Prince George area.

If I drive out by Dome Creek and I get on some of those north-facing slopes, we can dig pits, and we find no evidence of charcoal in some sites. Other areas, where we've done radiocarbon dating, fires occurred every thousand, every 1,500 years. It's a huge difference in the ecology in the forests, between here in the Prince George area and in the areas east of here.

I have this image. I'll show it to the audience first. When we look at this image of a large western red cedar, most people don't associate that with Prince George. They would say, "Oh, that's Vancouver Island," or maybe down on the Olympic peninsula. But this is a part of our natural heritage in the central Interior of B.C. It's sort of out of sight a lot of the time, but I think that area will increasingly be important as wood supply moves to that area. It's not an area that has a lot of pine. It has had previous outbreaks of hemlock looper.

There are parts of this ecosystem that have really high biological values. A lot of it is old. If you use a definition of 140 years and older as "old forest," about 60 percent of that landscape is still old. But the really high-value biological communities are some of these stands that have probably not had fire, where the trees are probably a thousand years old and more. That's a reasonable estimate. We've been calling them ancient cedar stands.

I don't know if any of you have visited the Ancient Forest Trail east of Prince George. It's a trail that the community built through one of these stands. There's incredible biological diversity in these areas. Some of my colleagues have 100-plus new species being described from these areas. These are species new to science around the world.

The Ancient Forest Trail has really created an opportunity for local communities to find out about these old cedar stands. This was just a community initiative. It's been built with volunteer labour and donations by various companies in the area.

This year we'll probably have 10,000 people hike down that trail. Some of my colleagues at UNBC have been doing interviews with tourists to that site. They're all incredibly enthusiastic about it. They often extend their stay to the region by a day. They plan on coming back with friends. About half of the people visiting tend to be from out of the region.

I've got some comments on page 6 here. Two of them are very indicative. One of them: "I've lived in Prince George for 36 years and never knew this place existed. Amazing to see such a spectacle with my friends." Many of my students still don't know that there are huge cedars just east of Prince George. And then the overseas audience, a comment from Australia: "A beautiful, enchanting forest. Please keep these beautiful old stands of trees, so inspiring and refreshing to the soul." Again, they're just amazed at the high quality of these old forest stands.

We work together with some of the colleagues at the B.C. integrated land management bureau in a project that finished up in 2008. We mapped all of these remaining sites. They don't grow everywhere on the landscape, although this is often in the tourism brochures. It's sort of become a bit of a poster child for tourism in the wetbelt forest and in the McBride and Dome Creek area.

They're actually quite rare in those landscapes. If we take the whole biogeoclimatic zone — the scientists sort of tend to categorize things that way — it's about a 130,000-hectare area, and the amount of those types of old cedar stands is about 3 percent of that area. So it's a very small part of the landscape. Probably half of those are now in old-growth management areas — either legal old-growth management areas or guidance old-growth management areas.

One of the real glaring absences is that virtually none are in provincial parks. There's a map on page 8 of the presentation to you, showing where these are located. The high biodiversity of the really old cedar stands is
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in red. You see them spread across this landscape from just east of Purden Lake over towards Dome Creek. This is all that is left. This is every last one of them mapped. And the green, which is provincial parks, hardly any of them fall into.

There are some 26 hectares in the provincial parks. The rest of the roughly 4,500 hectares is in the timber-harvesting land base. They have been recognized for their exceptional value. The previous minister designated a large set of them as guidance old-growth management areas, so there is advice to industry that they have special biodiversity values.

I've had the fortune of visiting many of the wet-temperate rainforests around the world. It's a rare ecosystem globally, and globally, most of the other developed countries have really capitalized on the tourism and biodiversity opportunities they present — New Zealand, Australia, Japan. In those countries a lot of the areas of this quality and sort of rarity are in national parks. Many of them have been designated as World Heritage areas.

I think that as forest managers we have a special responsibility in this part of the world. We have this incredible biological resource in the wet mountains east of town here. It really does have the potential in the future to be something like a World Heritage Site. It is that rare an ecosystem.

I note on page 9 of your presentation here. It's recently been highlighted in the Tourism B.C. campaign 100 B.C. Moments. They chose a hundred of sort of the top spots around British Columbia. We have an image of giant cedars, and we're urging people to visit them. I think there's enormous potential for these old cedar stands as an agent of economic diversification in this region, given their location on a major highway corridor and the very positive feedback we've had from visitors to them.

If I had to sort of sum up in terms of thoughts for you today, I have some recommendations on page 10. Certainly, in the interior plateau area, where we've had really serious impacts of pine beetle, we still need to have an eye out to where high-quality old forests are and ensure that we're providing habitat for plants and animals. There are important parts of the interior economy, both recreational and business, that still depend on those.

There are opportunities in the interior for increased wood supply around climate change. Usually we think of that as being a lack of opportunity.

When you get into the wet forest east of Prince George, these areas that have been mapped as ancient cedar stands have incredible non-timber forest values — for biological diversity, for tourism, for economic diversification. They're really almost a mismatch for the land use classification of old-growth management area that they have now. That's sort of how far they've progressed so far in terms of landscape-level planning.

Most of the provincial parks, which were designated back in the '90s in that area, don't contain representation of them, or that type of stand was logged before the parks were designated.

I'd like to urge the committee to think of old-growth management areas in a very nuanced manner. They are not the same across B.C. They are not the same within the Prince George forest district.

Certainly, to the east of Prince George we have some really exceptional old cedar stands that I think have far more economic, social and biological values if they are maintained as an old-forest status. We are separately developing proposals to perhaps put forward this idea for designation of a UNESCO World Heritage Site for this area.

J. Rustad (Chair): Thank you very much, Darwyn. I have to admit, growing up here as a young individual, to going out with my dad to some of the areas — particularly some of the cedar that had fallen down — and taking, salvaging some of that for firewood. It makes great kindling. In any case, I have seen some of those areas. They are absolutely spectacular; I would agree.

Unfortunately, you've taken up your whole time in terms of the presentation. I know there would be a number of questions, but thank you very much for presenting information and providing the commentary to the committee.

K. Hodges: Thank you very kindly. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Prince George. It's always a pleasure to meet leaders of the community and the province. This special committee provides opportunities for the public to speak openly on such a passionate but yet controversial topic that affects many. I thank you for this opportunity.

My name is Ken Hodges. I am a registered professional forester with 38 years of operational experience, 35 with the Ministry of Forests. My experience is diverse, from strategic planning right through to ensuring that the trees are planted green side up.

As professionals, we are well educated, with experience and knowledge gained over years of experience, with dedication and passion carried throughout the career. Our code of ethics requires professionals to advocate and practise good forest stewardship of forests based on sound ecological principles to sustain their ability to provide values assigned by society.

Sustainability is the action we take today to ensure that future generations enjoy forest and environmental values equivalent to those we benefit from today. In other words, we try to address the ecological and the environment while considering social and economical values in our decision-making process.

To assist forest professionals in the practice of profes-
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sional forestry, the association has legislation policies and guidelines. The most recent paper developed by the association is entitled Principles of Forest Stewardship. If you haven't read it, I would encourage you to do so. There are two other documents that may be of value, which include the Mid-Term Timber Supply Report and the assessment on the state of the inventory. I'd like to note that the forest professionals provide input into the development and outcome of these documents.

I have read the discussion paper and will focus on the questions noted in the paper, specifically: values and principles, cautions and advice, and opportunity for engagement.

The first true value for me, as a forest professional and a member of the public, is the forest. A resilient forest is a healthy forest, whether used for recreation, visual quality, ecosystem management or managed for timber supply.

Therefore, it is important that the management of our forests focuses on ecological, economic and social value balances, which are valued by all British Columbians, rather than undertaking expediency for political gains — in other words, ensuring that B.C.'s forests are sustainable in all of its forms.

Forest management is more than a one-year wheat crop but is managed sustainably for generations. Rotations can be 80 to 100 years or even longer. Thus, the health and welfare of our communities will be dependent upon our commitments today and sustainably managing our most important renewable resource. If we look after the forest, then the forest will certainly look after us.

The strategy of harvesting constraint areas is short-term and non-sustainable. Strategies around constraint areas focus on specific rationales for biological diversity, economic opportunities to protect the strategies for today and also in the future. As a forest professional, I believe we need to reaffirm our commitment and strategies for protecting constrained areas.

An example provided in Smithers around areas like Spatsizi, with exceptional national, international and tourism recreational opportunities, needs protecting from harvest encroachment. This is what makes B.C. beautiful and unique.

Also, just what Darwyn Coxson mentioned on the uniqueness east of Prince George and the ICH and the old-growth areas…. East of Prince George is a very diverse and rich ecological landscape with significant old growth, visuals, wildlife habitat and ecological constraint areas. The levels of unmanaged diversity are well below recommended amounts considering its biodiversity, complexity and potential impact by climate change.

Once the beetle areas located west of Prince George are harvested, the pressure will focus on the very diverse, resilient and very rich growing sites east of Prince George. Prince George is in a very enviable situation of available future volumes. That's not to say we won't have a falldown of AAC levels in the future. However, there are significant opportunities that can soften the reduction of the annual allowable cut.

There is no silver bullet in this process of offsetting the timber supply falldown. We've known about this for some ten years. From a forestry perspective, there are real opportunities through incremental silviculture strategies, but I must caution you about bringing stands on line too early, which may result in creating future timber supply issues.

Another strategic opportunity includes partial harvest — some people consider it commercial thinning — and secondary structure retention. Again, I would caution you specifically about the levels of timber removal, location and species composition. Research indicates that the secondary structure and mature trees do release and add increment.

For the best net present value, or the return on your investment, and increased growth for the mid-term, one may consider boosting the growth through fertilizing five years prior to harvesting. The magnitude of this strategy certainly needs analysis, but there are notable gains in volume, thus a positive impact on the mid-term timber supply.

To make this work efficiently, updated inventory is mandatory. That means commitment, staff and funding. Both the Forest Practices Board and the Association of B.C. Forest Professionals noted that the forest inventory is fairly outdated.

Research is another key component in the process to assist forest management strategies, future product opportunities and innovation. Legacy research trials located throughout the province are a wealth of information in addressing timber supply and future strategies with consideration for climate change. These installations need dusting off, remeasurement and maintenance. Overall support of research is imperative in the management of forest ecosystems and innovations.

Landscape planning identifies management strategies for all of the resources, which provide consistency and clear direction for activities across the landscape. As an example, the United Nations identifies a 100-kilometre area around a community for food supply within economic considerations. Maybe we need to consider a similar strategy for forest management opportunities in which to focus our energies and investments.

The best landscape planning provides long-term stability while providing current employment for forest professionals, tradespeople and, thus, stable forest communities. These suggestions work hand in hand with communities and government in the development of other innovative opportunities. There are other opportunities to discuss, but again, time is quite limited.

The second key value focuses on communities. It appears that communities are proactive in diversifying and
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strategizing to address the future, where timber plays a lesser role but not a less important role in the future makeup of their communities.

In some communities the age distribution is at either end of the age scale — for example, immature stands at one end and mature stands at the other end, with little or no distribution in the centre. In this case the mountain pine beetle has exacerbated the issues, resulting in increased harvesting across the landscape through liquidation of mature pine stands otherwise expected to be maintained for the future. The outcome of communities with this scenario was well known, and the communities knew this day would come. It just hit sooner with the mountain pine beetle impact.

The question is: how can we offset the timber supply? The options are limited, depending on the age distribution of the stands. Mitigation strategies can only occur if the trees are in the ground.

The keys are ages, distribution, site industries, etc., that can benefit incremental silviculture strategies that will assist in offsetting the timber supply. In addition, we may wish to utilize lower-volume stands. However, impacting restrained timber is a very slippery slope and may result in negative impacts from other innovative opportunities, strategies and our future.

Other strategies may involve changing administrative boundaries, appurtenancy and reallocation of timber supply. In these situations, I must caution you about taking timber from other communities and licensees.

The decision process and final decision need transparency and open communication with communities and the public. There are opportunities for government to guide communities while assisting them in community diversity and sustainability. The opportunities include reduced red tape, supporting innovation and exploration for businesses, development and community growth.

The final concerns revolve around government legislation and policy changes. In the past changes have occurred unexpectedly and unwanted by public, the forest profession and even businesses. The results from changes in legislation or policy were negative and/or devastating to one group or another without consultation, transparency or open communication. Two examples of this legislation policy are the repeal of the appurtenancy legislation and the DFAM program.

In conclusion, the forests need to be number one in the process by ensuring longevity of the resources through sustainability, diversity and resilience, while practising good forest stewardship. With the assistance of streamlined government processes, research, creativity and innovative opportunities may result in community resilience.

When recommending legislation, policy and program changes, ensure open communication, due diligence and transparency with those affected. The message is: learn from your mistakes from the past, and ensure they don't happen again.

Simple public communication strategies and involvement of key players — like the Association of B.C. Forest Professionals, its members and their expertise — are imperative in the decision-making process.

No matter how complex the issue or diverse the responses are, this is an opportunity for the province to grow, diversify and become stronger.

N. Macdonald (Deputy Chair): Thank you very much for the presentation and the work that you do as a professional. I take your point about the need for updated inventory and about research, especially with the changes we know are coming with climate change.

In terms of what you said about the opportunities for supporting innovation, just to be clear, your sense is that all of that can be done within current legislative framework? Or do you think that there's specific legislative change that would enhance those opportunities?

K. Hodges: I think the legislation allows for the innovative strategies. It's a matter of…. If you're deciding to add legislation, just be aware that you could be acting on other…. For example, with communities or licensees, if you're changing boundaries, that would have to be maybe legislation or policy changes. But most of the strategies that are here — I think the legislation allows for most of it to occur.

B. Routley: I note that you've got incremental silviculture strategies, and I just wondered if you could expand a bit more on that.

K. Hodges: Incremental strategies address…. Fertilizing would be a big one. Spacing, pruning, commercial thinning — those types of things could all be useful in the strategies to offset mid-term timber supply. Again, if the trees aren't there, you can't do it.

A. Cheramy: Thank you for allowing me to speak to you today. I know John Rustad; I don't know the others here. I'm trying to represent the farmers in this area — from the Salmon River and also district C, right around the Prince George area here. We've got input from quite
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a few people to put these couple of pages together here.

Forest on agriculture development areas. The forests that are attached to AD lands are necessary for the viability of the future farm unit by providing some of the following assets: air, forests, vegetation. Future farmers' fields of green convert carbon dioxide to oxygen, providing quality air for us to breathe.

Water. The forest floor filters the snowmelt, the rainwater through gravel and sand into the aquifer, to springs and wells, providing good drinking water. Snowmelt, precipitation trickle through the forest, turning into streams and creeks. Beaver dams slow the water flow, providing continued water supply throughout the dry summer months, which aids the prevention of soil erosion.

Soil. Natural forests, vegetation build and improve topsoil annually. Composting grass, leaves, fallen trees returns nutrients to the soil for us. Natural wind protection and shading slow dehydration of the soil and vegetation. Nature requires hundreds of years to produce topsoil.

Under "food," forests provide edible plants, insects, birds, wildlife, natural pastures, shelter and water for cattle and other livestock, and fish in the ponds and the streams.

Forests provide sustainable wood products for the future farm unit, community and sawmills, thereby enhancing the local economy. Sustainable forests provide revenue to both develop and maintain the future farm unit.

On the arable and non-arable land, the timber and the non-timber resources have economic and non-economic ecological, hydroecological and cultural benefits, assisting the viability of the future farm unit.

Area-based tenures. The right to occupy on ADA lands could be detrimental to the future of agriculture by revenue loss. Clearcut logging prevents sustainable assets and revenues, hindering the development and maintenance of the future farm units.

Toxic-waste dumping contaminates the food-producing topsoil, vegetation, surface water and aquifers — our drinking water.

Erosion. Fertile topsoil needed for agriculture erodes away from the quick snowmelt and spring runoff caused by clearcut logging, especially on sloping, non-arable portions. Under "arable," buried stumps, logs and debris caused by poor logging and clearing practices make it impractical for cultivation for agricultural use.

Topsoils. Stumps and topsoil pushed into draws and into burn piles are detrimental to the growing capabilities, caused by these poor logging and clearing practices.

Noxious weeds. Large noxious-weeds infestations may be caused by clearcut logging and left unmanaged for years.

Fire hazard. Clearcut logging left unmanaged with lots of fractured wood debris and grass on wide-open spaces will dry out during the summer, creating a high fire-hazard risk on the ADA lands adjacent to farm units and surrounding lands.

Availability. Tenures could have preference over agriculture use, hindering the availability of the ADA lands for agricultural use.

Food security. Tenures could remove valuable assets, merchantable timber, thereby preventing a future viable farm unit from producing food.

We must continue to maintain and enforce the order of the Minister of Agriculture and Lands under section 93.4 of the Land Act, dated November 21, 2006, for the areas within the Fort St. James, Vanderhoof, Prince George and Mackenzie forest districts. "Land use objectives." Part D, No. 1: "No area-based forest tenures will be established within these agricultural development areas and settlement reserve areas."

We must continue to reserve ADA land as a land base for the security of our food supply for the future of our community, for the future of our province, British Columbia, for the future of our nation, Canada, for the future generations to follow.

J. Rustad (Chair): Thank you very much. I'll look to committee members for any questions they may have.

Perhaps I could just ask one question on the ADA lands. Roughly how much of the ADA land is within those four areas? Maybe you don't know this, so I can perhaps ask some ministry staff down the road about this. But roughly how much area is in those, and are they primarily located along the waterways, along the transportation areas, or are there other areas where they are located?

A. Cheramy: I'm not too sure. I kind of understand that there are lands that are reserved that are suitable for agriculture. If you take 160 acres around this area, usually there's half of it or whatever that's flat and arable, and then there's non-arable. The non-arable also goes with the farm, adds to it.

J. Rustad (Chair): Do the ADA lands follow primarily the soil-mapping in the agricultural lands in terms of the better-quality soils, or are they more distributed?

Thank you very much for your presentation and for providing us with the information.

D. Radies: Good stuff. I've been living in Prince George for over 13 years — 15 years now. I came up from the Lower Mainland, from Surrey-Newton. My grandfather is from Lumby.

D. Radies: I thought there might be some linkage here somewhere because, I mean, we're all….

D. Radies: Anyways…. There's always a small world for all of us because we are somehow a community. My brother also, Doug Radies, spent quite a bit of time in the Cariboo-Chilcotin and spearheaded a park at the end of Quesnel Lake. So a fairly rich family history.

D. Radies: As you can imagine, our family dinner table conversations were pretty active. If you'd known my grandfather, he was a real bluecoat and a logger and was the mayor of a logging town for 35 years. My older brother Doug, super tree hugger, went into the Cariboo-Chilcotin and got threatened with getting shot and all the rest of it. But now you've got a beautiful park up there, and people appreciate it. He's now a teacher. I think he's had four kids now. He lives in a little apartment in Vancouver.

My dad is an economist. He's a pilot — for a lot years. Before, he came from a Romanian family with not a lot, made his way up the ranks, rode the wave. I was privileged enough to be able to sort of ride on his coat-tails and be able to spend some time at university, for probably a better part of ten years, I believe it was, after that crusade that my brother had for ten years for the Cariboo Mountains.

I know a lot of people in this room that have talked about the ancient forest. I did a lot of work in the ancient forest. I spent ten years in it after. I think the paper…. I'm quoted in the back of this paper. I spent a good four or five of them walking through devil's club and paying my dues and even paying my dues by looking through microscopes and looking at lichens and all the rest of it.

Forestry is a complicated topic, because it obviously is politically driven. We've had Larry Pedersen come — hi, Larry — to the university to talk on behalf the government in terms of how we're going to get timber, fibre supply and all the rest of it.

It's been a long journey. I mean, it's gone from a journey where — at least for me…. I guess I've got more of a journey to go here, I suppose, because now I'm working for the Takla Lake First Nation as their mining coordinator. So I'm out of the forestry business and now into mining.

I would like to talk a little bit about sort of the plan for the north and northern region and jobs and how jobs move around and where there are other opportunities. I obviously don't believe, like a lot of these people have been talking about today…. I don't necessarily believe in…. I'm quite disheartened by the fact that we're looking at keeping the cut at the same level, to be honest.

We need…. Obviously, we're all in the same boat together. We've got the capitalists, and we've got the tree huggers or whatever you want to call them, but we're all in the same boat together, and we've got to figure this out. We spent a lot of time at the dinner table talking about this type of stuff as well.

We have to be careful about the industry basically lobbying, because obviously they have their needs, and obviously people have their needs, in order to have jobs. But we have to be careful about where we're going here today, because we're really, as they would say, potentially stealing from the future generations with this type of plan. I'm not saying….

Forestry is very complex, as Darwyn talked about. I mean, it depends on where you are, what you're talking about, or how you can do it. But some of the spruce trees in those old-growth cedar forests are 500 years old or whatever and are some of the best wood in this world.

I've seen them, most of the time, just go for dimensional lumber. We've talked about value-added products. We've talked about all this. We've got to put reins on industry. We've got to tell industry: "You guys have got to give us more jobs per board foot." It can't just continue to go: "We've got to be more efficient, and we're going to continue to be efficient with our mills, so we need less people." We need less people. There are less people per board foot. That's been steady.

We've also increased our level of cut throughout the province since the '80s. Every time we have an insect infestations, we raise the level of cut, and it never comes back down. So here we go again. We've raised the cut because we had this mountain pine beetle epidemic, which was not a natural epidemic. It was also a natural disaster of forest management.
[ Page 378 ]

I do know that in the '80s, when there was logging all throughout Quesnel Lake and all around those areas, they were logging 500-, 200-, 300-year-old spruce in the high-elevation alpine — it will take forever to grow back, and we'll never see wood like that again — to build something like shovels, piano keyboards, whatever we're going to build out of it. That wood is gone. We're not getting it with the spindly pine that we've planted.

Certainly, I've got a friend with two fingers that told me that whenever you point a finger at somebody, four fingers are pointing back at you. So this is not a finger-pointing kind of thing. It's just a serious, serious issue.

It's a serious issue in terms of the overall picture, and really what's driving it is we have capitalism in nature. In Canada part of the capitalistic model is that we're just going to continue to feed resources to the rest of the world.

The capitalistic model, as we know, is having some problems these days. We also know that we're having problems ecologically. We have climate change. One of the worst things that we could do, as we move forward here for the future generations, is have an economic and an ecological disaster. It won't be pretty, I don't think.

At the same time, the classes tend to be separating. The rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer. People are having to work longer hours.

I didn't come today prepared with any speech. I just came today as a person that's spent a lot of time and a lot of energy on this stuff.

We need solutions. We need to work together. We all need to work together. It's not just businesses need to work together with businesses; we need businesses to work together with people that work in the forest. The people that work in the forest, the ecologists and all them, need to work with the forester. They need to work with the logger.

We're not going to come to any solutions by forest companies lobbying for more wood with supermills and reducing the amount of jobs per board foot without some kind of crisis where we're going to hit the wall eventually here. We're just trying to delay the wall. Part of that is that people will say…. Cynics will say that the problem with it is that we're managing our forestry too much with politics, because if we can get people to work, we know we'll get the votes to get people in.

At the same time, we need leadership, because this is a pretty serious time in this province, and this is a pretty serious decision that you guys are sitting around trying to make. I would really appreciate it if we gave it some more attention and spent some more time, and bring not just the industry lobby and the five choices that we get — which are: log more, log more, log more, log more, log more — and bring some other choices to this table. We've heard some of them today.

I guess I've talked, maybe, enough about forestry. I'm going to shift a little bit to mining and oil and gas. When you're trying to look at the way in which you balance an economy and you're looking at the economic diversity that we have in this province, we also have opportunity to make money without having as much impact, potentially, in other industries. As you may know, a mine can generate a fair amount of revenue for the area that it disturbs.

The problem is that we can't just say, "Okay, well, we're going to have that mine, and we're going to keep the level of cut increase at this level, and we're going to have ten mines, and we're going to increase the level of cut, and we're going to have three pipelines going through this province," without a plan. It's got to be a plan, and it's got to look at the big picture.

I was in Scandinavia one time, and I still remember the old Swedish forester. We were talking about conflict and the conflicting issues on forest lands, the demands from all different groups. I still remember him drawing on his pipe and then looking at us and saying: "We are only on this planet a very short time and a very long time dead, and we need to learn how to work together."

I think you're saying that in another way, and you're talking about all of the conflicting land use issues. I want you to know that we are very much aware of all of the conflicting issues, and a lot of us share some of the concerns that you have said, that we've got a need to try to find balance for all of that. I don't know whether the province already has got that right or not. There is no question that there are corporate and other values that are being pushed on us at one time or another.

Obviously, there is a need for jobs. I think, as I said earlier, that one of the big environmental problems of our time is also poverty. Like, throughout the world when you look at what's happening to forest lands, whether it's in South America or in other countries where there's a lot of poverty, we're damaging our forest land base because people need to live. They're literally burning down forests just to have a little bit of grazing land for cattle.

I'm concerned about exporting environmental degradation to other parts of the planet if we don't get it right.

I guess in finishing up, my question to you would be…. You've read some of the material. You certainly talked about mining. In terms of the land use, there's a lot of value there. What I guess I didn't hear is: are you thinking that some of the mining activities are going to help deal with the employment issue?

Obviously, politicians are often driven by desperate times, and these are desperate times. There's no question about that. We're confronted with dangers on all sides
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and a whole lot of conflicting values, if you like. But we do have to take a measured and balanced approach.

Are you suggesting that there are other job opportunities? Essentially, I guess you're saying: "Don't tinker with what we already have." I want to make sure I've got that right.

D. Radies: In terms of don't tinker with what we already have, if I was to be very moderate today, I would say okay. If I was to put my ecologist hat on…. I mean, there are tons of articles out there and all the rest of it about how 50 percent of the land base should be maintained to ensure that we have resilient forests into the future.

What I'm talking about is that when you're looking at jobs, when you're looking at mining, when you're looking at what the best bang for your buck is….

I know that everybody is looking at northeastern B.C. There are a lot of issues around fracking, etc. I know you guys will hear all about that. At the same time there are a lot of people going up that way, to Fort McMurray, to work. There are a lot of work opportunities there.

There are also work opportunities…. There's been a small mini-boom in mineral exploration and in mines more recently, it appears. Certainly, the amount of revenue that those generate, in terms of the area versus forestry…. It's all location-based.

It's a good idea to put aside some of those old-growth forests — absolutely. They're never going to come back. If you're going to log some of these old-growth forests, you might as well call it mining as well. But that kind of mining covers thousands of hectares, and actually, the government only gets 25 cents a cubic metre for it. So we get hardly anything for it — right? Whereas with mining, you might be able to produce millions of dollars that are coming in for the hospitals and the schools and the rest of it.

We have to balance it out. You can't just say that we're going to do it all. You can't, and that's basically the direction that I believe it's going right now. What I speak passionately about today is that the balance has to come not just by sort of separating all these different industries and having different lobbies but really thinking that one through.

One last point about poverty. My grandmother was from Romania, and she was really poor. She was the best conservationist of the family. She didn't talk as much, but she was the best conservationist. She used absolutely everything. I know that most of us here in Canada and North America that are immigrants, which is basically all of us, have that type of a background, and I think there's something to learn from that.

I don't think our consumption and having more cars and bigger houses and more 2-by-4s and all the rest of it is part of the solution — right? So if poor people have to live and they've got to get by and they've got to eat…. What do you need? You need water, you need food, you need shelter, you need love, and you need community. You don't necessarily need money. Certainly, none of us in North America…. A few of us are starving. Some of us are, yes. But there are a lot of us that aren't, and that's part of the task, part of the challenge.

Like I said, no pointing fingers, because I live here too. I'm just pointing out the facts that those are the types of things that I see going on in Canada, in this province, and that those are the things we need to be aware of when we talk about continuing to keep a high-level of cut when, first off, we're not getting a lot of money for the wood and when we're not increasing our jobs. They're reducing our jobs through efficiency because we're not doing forestry properly.

Do forestry well. Increase your jobs. Do selective harvesting. Make them pay for good spruce. Do something with it.

J. Rustad (Chair): Sorry. We're out of time, but thank you very much for your presentation.

M. MacDonald: Good afternoon, and on National Aboriginal Day I would like to acknowledge that we are on the traditional territory of the Lheidli T'enneh people.

First off, I'll give you a bit of my background. I grew up in Vanderhoof. I've got a large family that lives in and around the Vanderhoof and Fraser Lake area. Many of my family members have, over the years, done different jobs in the forest industry. In preparing for my presentation today, I have talked to my family members, and they've provided me with some input as well, so I will be sharing some of their perspective.

My own personal background is that I've lived in Prince George here for well over ten years now, after growing up in Vanderhoof. I used to work as a lawyer. More recently I work as a social worker. A lot of my experience is dealing with some of the social and, I might add, costly-to-government issues that can come from dealing with boom-and-bust resource extraction economies.

I've also been involved on a couple of environmental fronts, specifically air quality and looking at, for instance, Enbridge northern gateway wanting to put an oil pipeline through this territory.

What prompted me to come today, to be quite honest, was something of a state of alarm when I read in the Citizen the question: how can timber supply be increased in B.C.'s central Interior?

I thought: "That is a really scary starting question." I was very concerned. I thought that it is really important to show up, because this is really important — what you people are deciding today. I want to thank you for giving us members of the public an opportunity to talk.

I think one of the gentlemen…. Sorry, I don't have
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my glasses. Mr. Bains, you asked the question earlier. Basically, the crux of the question is: do we do more with less, or do we increase the timber supply? I like how you framed that question, because to me that's really the question that we should be asking.

In my perspective and in my submission, the current level of timber cut in B.C. is simply not sustainable. With the advent of the pine beetle, my understanding — from talking to my family members and from my own experience recalling it — was that the cut was increased at that time, primarily for the large tenure holders. It was known at that time, and it should still be remembered, that that was a temporary measure to deal with the pine beetle pandemic.

I guess we're getting to the end of that available cut, and now we're looking at: "Okay, now what are we going to do?" But really, that was a temporary raising to what would, long term, be an unsustainable cut.

What's been happening, it appears to me and my family and other people that I know, is that we're seeing an increasing trend toward an exporting of raw resources out of the province. I should add that that's not only in the timber sector. This is also in oil, for instance, and other resource extraction sectors.

In the past, looking specifically at the timber market, the U.S. was our primary trade partner. A lot of the lumber went into housing. It was high-quality product. They were seeking high-quality product, and it was for building permanent structures. Now it seems like our market is increasingly shifting over to Asia, primarily. What it seems to me is that we're sort of being forced into a position to provide cheaper product.

When we are talking about exporting to Asia, I think we're in direct competition with countries such as Indonesia, for instance, where labour and environmental standards in the forestry sector can be extremely low. There can be illegal logging going on and so forth. That's increasingly driving down costs, and really, is that who we want to be competing with?

I mean, my concern is that we're lowering our standards in order to compete in this global market. I ask myself if maybe we're in the wrong market. Maybe we need to be looking at different markets where the quality of our product counts for that much more.

I just note that a study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives in 2011 noticed that 2,630 processing jobs are being exported out of the country by focusing on the export of products that we're not doing a lot of value-adding to, 2,400 forest industry jobs are being lost in the form of usable wood that's being left behind at logging spots in the forest, and over 10,000 long-term jobs are being lost due to lack of manufacturing and so forth with wood products in the province.

It seems to me that, under present forest policies, the primary beneficiaries are the large tenure holders — some of the supermill owners, for instance. What seems to be lacking is local access to the forests and local control over the forests. I mean, the history of our area is that it was local logging shows and small community-based sawmills, and they've just been getting bigger and bigger and more centralized over time.

So I would really like to emphasize again, and I've heard some of the others speakers allude to this as well, that there is a need for a more value-added focus with what we've already had and to look at the other values of the forest — not only economic values but also the environmental values, the health values and quality-of-life values that connect to the forests.

Canada is known as a place capable of producing high-value products. I think we have established that international reputation over the years. We also have a highly educated population.

So there is an opportunity to really support local enterprises that may want to get into the value-added sector. They need access, though, like the large tenure holders, to the resources out of the forests. Along with that, I would just like to mention that there is a growing realization that we're living at unsustainable levels in North America.

One thing, for instance, that I just kind of thought was sort of related was that there is a small-house movement starting up in the United States. With the drop in the economic market there, people started downsizing. I happen to have a book with me called Tiny Homes: Simple Shelter.

This not only gives you an example of some of the things we can look at in terms of coming about with more sustainable lifestyles, but also maybe Canadians sort of looking at…. Maybe we could build some cabins — more cabins. I know there are already some cabins being built, but there is certainly that movement afoot to build these little shelters and so forth.

It seems we're running out of mature trees in this area. Increasingly large areas need to be logged to get at the remaining ones. For instance, my brother — he's a forester — was telling me that one of these supermills could easily plow through 40 acres in a day to be able to access the logs they might need to process. The question we need to ask is: are we wanting to relegate our forests to clearcuts and slash piles when you're looking at operations of that size?

Basically, what we're looking at is a question of trade-offs. Once upon a time, society and the local communities here were willing to tolerate some clearcuts, some logging.

In exchange, we got some long-term community jobs. But in my submission, this balance seems to be now really becoming out of whack. The focus is more and more on exporting the raw resources as quickly as possible — you know, economic growth. The payoff in exchange for going in to our forests to this extent does not seem to be there as it once was.

Canadians, by and large, really value the wilderness. I
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think probably all of you people share that. People talked here about the Ancient Forest and how important that is to local people. I might add that that the Ancient Forest is really well attended by tourists travelling through. I think there is always vehicles stopped there and people wandering through that forest.

Tourism. This whole forest between here and the McBride area is very, very special — huge tourism potential there, and probably very untapped in certain regards. The concern would be that if you embark on these sorts of unsustainable logging practices, the further you go down there, who else are you putting out of business in the meantime — like tourism operators, guides, people who are also working in the forest for non-timber reasons? That would be a question.

Another concern is the potential that the sensitive riparian areas could start to be logged. Already, we've got the federal government removing protection for fish habitat with their recent budget bill. So that is a concern too — that some of these sensitive riparian zones are not going to be protected by anything.

I think that we need to really look at some of the other values in the forests — for instance, the wildlife habitat that's provided, the parks, the sensitive old-growth areas. Canada has got a reputation for being a place of wilderness. I've just done some travelling, and basically when we met people, it was that Canada is known, primarily, for the wilderness here.

We're not necessarily known for the 2-by-4s or whatever we're exporting out of the country. We're known for our wilderness. I think that's one of our biggest assets. Maybe there needs to be some more development in that sector and some support for that.

I like the point that was made by one of the speakers, who said…. I think, actually, it was you, Mr. Routley. If we export our ideas for managing the forest, if we're doing it in an unsustainable way, that could potentially be a problem as well.

Over time, our forests and the wilderness in Canada is becoming that much more of an asset as forests around the world are steadily being degraded. So if we want to sort of hold ourselves up as an example of how to do things sustainably, it's really imperative that we look at protecting our forests.

In conclusion, the basic question, it seems to me, is: do we do more with less, or do we increase the timber supply? In my opinion, we need to look at how to do more with less. We need to look at the non-timber uses of the forest — the aboriginal traditional uses, the fact that the forest provides home for wildlife, the enjoyment that people have of the forests, the fresh air they provide, the trees. We are undervaluing ourselves if we continue on this, exporting as much raw resource as quickly as possible. I think maybe we might want to look at whether we're in the wrong market altogether.

I also think that currently large industries have too much clout over government policy. I really do want to thank you for taking this opportunity to listen directly to the people of the province because the people's concerns are not necessarily the same concerns that big industry have.

The forests around here are our home. The locals need to be supported. We need to have more focus on the sustainable, value-added ideas that people have. We also need to look at supporting people who are using the forest for non-timber purposes, and we need to embrace the non-timber values of the forests.

I would like to just reiterate the critique of capitalism that Dave Radies mentioned, that our current model of economic growth is simply not working. I know it's not maybe within our power to change our capitalist system, but we can maybe think about how we can start to work towards a more sustainable way of being, specifically with respect to forest policy.

J. Rustad (Chair): Mary, thank you very much for your presentation and your passion. Unfortunately, you've used the full 15 minutes, but we very much appreciate your taking some time, actually on short notice, to present this to us.

At this time we have no other speakers that are on our registered list, so we have some time available now for an open mike if anybody would be interested in presenting to our committee.

J. Rustad (Chair): I'm sorry. If I could ask you to do that on written…. If anybody that hasn't already presented would like to come up for an open-mike session….

Okay. Seeing nobody else on that, what I'd like to encourage is for the people that would like to have added a few additional comments, please avail yourself of the opportunity to send us some written information. The website, once again, is www.leg.bc.ca/timbercommittee. We will be going through all the material that we receive, both orally here in meetings as well as written, that gets submitted to us.

At this time I'd like to thank everybody for coming out and for participating in this. This is obviously a very critical and passionate issue that impacts all of us, particularly through this mountain pine beetle epidemic. I'd like to take another moment to thank the members of Hansard for their work in this, as well as the members from the Clerk's office for doing all the coordination and making sure that all of this can happen.

With that, thank you once again. Our next meeting starts at 4 p.m. up in Mackenzie. So with that, the meeting is now adjourned.

Hansard Services publishes transcripts both in print and on the Internet.
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Question Period podcasts are available on the Internet.

2) James Steidle
3) Sinclar Group Forest Products Ltd.	Bruce McLean
	Greg Stewart
4) Dave King
5) McMillan Creek Farmers and Women's Institute of Prince George	Mike Johnson
6) Svend Serup
7) University of Northern British Columbia	Darwyn Coxson
8) Ken Hodges
9) Salmon River Farmers Institute	Aime Cheramy
10) Dave Radies
11) Mary MacDonald

Chair:	* John Rustad (Nechako Lakes BC Liberal)
Deputy Chair:	* Norm Macdonald (Columbia River–Revelstoke NDP)
Members:	* Harry Bains (Surrey-Newton NDP)
	* Donna Barnett (Cariboo-Chilcotin BC Liberal)
	* Eric Foster (Vernon-Monashee BC Liberal)
	* Bill Routley (Cowichan Valley NDP)
	* Ben Stewart (Westside-Kelowna BC Liberal)
	* denotes member present
Clerk:	Craig James
Committee Staff:	Larry Pedersen (Technical Advisor)
	Jacqueline Quesnel (Administrative Coordinator)
Attending Government Staff:	Dave Peterson (Chief Forester, Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations)

Witnesses:	Aime Cheramy (President, Salmon River Farmers Institute)
	Darwyn Coxson (University of Northern British Columbia)
	Frank Everitt (City of Prince George)
	Shari Green (Mayor, City of Prince George)
	Ken Hodges
	Mike Johnson (McMillan Creek Farmers and Women's Institute of Prince George)
	Dave King
	Mary MacDonald
	Bruce McLean (Sinclar Group Forest Products Ltd.; Lakeland Mills Ltd.)
	Dave Radies
	Svend Serup
	James Steidle
	Greg Stewart (President, Sinclar Group Forest Products Ltd.; Lakeland Mills Ltd.)

1) City of Prince George	Mayor Shari Green
	Councillor Frank Everitt

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS (Hansard)

SPECIAL COMMITTEE ON TIMBER SUPPLY

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SPECIAL COMMITTEE ON
TIMBER SUPPLY