Timber Supply — Issue No. 22 — Tuesday, July 10, 2012 (HTML)

Strategy Room 320, Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue
580 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, B.C.

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 9:34 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	635
P. Zevit
M. Semeniuk
J. Hackett
M. Cameron
J. Clogg
H. Harshaw
O. Quinn
S. Manhas
M. Clark
B. McNaughton
R. Slaco
D. Janz
J. Lawrence
J. Betts
B. Gray
M. Fenger

J. Rustad (Chair): Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our Special Committee on Timber Supply meeting. My name is John Rustad. I'm the MLA for Nechako Lakes.

This morning we are meeting here in Vancouver. I'd like to start with introductions, starting with Eric on my right here.

N. Macdonald (Deputy Chair): Good morning. My name is Norm Macdonald, and I'm the MLA for Columbia River–Revelstoke.

J. Rustad (Chair): Along with our committee we have two special advisers, former chief foresters Larry Pedersen and Jim Snetsinger. Also travelling with us, and who seems to be at all of our meetings, is our current chief forester, Dave Peterson.

To my left here is Kate Ryan-Lloyd. She is the Clerk of Committees. At the back we have Morgan Lay, who is also with the Clerk's office.

For anybody that is listening to this who's planning to come down to present to us, make sure that you check in with Morgan as you come in so that we have a list of the people that are here for presenting.

As well, everything that this committee does is recorded live and broadcasted on the Internet through Hansard Services. Today with us we have Michael Baer and Monique Goffinet Miller, who have done a great service for us. I want to have a special mention of Monique. This is her last day with Hansard Services. She is moving on to a great new position. I want to thank her for her years of service to the Legislature.

The Special Committee on Timber Supply was struck in May with a mandate to look at the mid-term fibre supply, the issue associated in particular with the mountain pine beetle epidemic, and whether or not there were any ways that we could try to mitigate some of that impact to the timber supply.

The committee has gone out to do a significant amount of consultation. We started a number of weeks ago in Smithers, travelling along the Highway 16 Corridor out to Valemount, including Fort St. James and Mackenzie. Last week we were down in the Cariboo, from 100 Mile House up to Prince George, including a field day in Quesnel. This week we are doing three days of provincial consultations, meeting with stakeholders and others, and then we will wrap up in Merritt and Kamloops on Thursday, and the work of the committee will be completed. We are required to have a report in to the Legislature by August 15 of this year.

Through the consultation and through the work, we are asking people a number of questions, in particular: what values and principles should guide decision-making regarding potential actions to mitigate the timber supply impacts? What specific information about your local area should the committee know and consider? What cautions and advice do you have for this committee in considering whether and how to mitigate mid-term timber supply?

Along with the public presentations that are done to our committee, there's an opportunity to present information in a written format, and that can be found through our website, which is www.leg.bc.ca/timbercommittee. People have until July 20 to be able to submit written submissions to the committee.

This morning we are now going to start with the consultations. Our first presenter is the Association of Professional Biology — Pamela Zevit.

P. Zevit: Good morning. My name is Pamela Zevit. I am actually the past president of the Association of Professional Biology and presently the chair of practice advisory and professional ethics. On behalf of the Association of Professional Biology — and I'll probably refer to that as the APB more simply throughout the presentation — we appreciate being invited to provide input on this important provincial issue.

We begin with a brief background on the association so that you may have a better understanding of the important role that we and our members play in the development of conservation and resource management policy at all levels. The APB has formally represented the interests of biology professionals in British Columbia since 1980. The association was originally formed by academic, government and private sector interests to collectively bring recognition, credibility and legislative accountability to the professional practice of applied biology.

Our members represent and adhere to the highest
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standards and expertise in application of science and professional ethical conduct across a broad range of disciplines, including conservation biology, environmental toxicology, land and resource management, and impact assessment. At present the association represents approximately 1,000 biology professionals in this province.

Governed under the College of Applied Biology Act, our members subscribe to a strict code of ethics that includes a requirement to uphold the principles of stewardship. The association defines stewardship as the care and management of ecosystems to ensure a continued flow of ecological goods and services to nature and humans.

In consideration, therefore, of what questions the special committee is tasked with deliberating on, and in keeping with the association's foundational principles, we provide the following recommendations on the mid-term timber supply issue. In particular, the association has focused on where such decisions relate to and may impact the maintenance of high environmental standards and protection of critical habitat for species and key environmental values.

The first question is: what values and principles should guide the evaluation and decision-making regarding potential actions to mitigate the timber supply impacts?

British Columbia's forest reserve areas provide a diversity of ecological benefits that help keep this province's working forests healthy, productive and resilient. These reserves assist the province in meeting its biodiversity objectives by protecting critical habitat for species and ecological communities at risk. As an example, some of the larger forest reserves are vitally important to the management and recovery of threatened caribou or northern goshawk populations in B.C. as well as a host of other federally and provincially listed species.

Furthermore, these same reserves create landscape-level buffers that mitigate the impacts of catastrophic disturbance events such as fires and floods. Protecting these types of ecosystem benefits is even more crucial, given that the severity and frequency of disturbance events are expected to increase with climate change.

If you've spent a few days in the Lower Mainland, and I know you've been in the Interior, you've noticed a lot of haze over the last week. That's an example of some of the global issues that are influencing B.C. right now.

Structural diversity is vital to protecting these services. Large-diameter wildlife trees and downed wood common in old-growth management areas provide habitat for many important natural silvicultural pest control species such as cavity-nesting birds and bats.

Riparian areas provide direct and indirect habitat for species such as salmon that return ocean-derived nutrients to their spawning streams. These nutrients are then dispersed to riparian and upland forests through wildlife food chain interactions, further sustaining the entire forest community in a seasonal cycle of productivity.

Under the College of Applied Biology Act and guiding tenets, registered biology professionals must also work in the public interest.

Old-growth management areas, wildlife habitat areas and ungulate winter ranges serve not only to protect survival habitat for species at risk but for a number of commercially important game species. Many of these are of significant harvest value for human use, such as moose, deer, bear and mountain goat. These species rely on well-connected, diverse habitat mosaics, of which intact forest reserves are crucial.

This province's forest-dependent ecological assets — whether they be for hunting, fishing, traditional subsistence or cultural and spiritual use — contribute to sustaining rural communities and the provincial economy in general.

We believe that overall, B.C. will benefit more from taking a long-term, conservative and conservation-based approach to forest management than one that serves to sacrifice ecological services in favour of enhanced timber supply. To accomplish this, decision-makers and resource managers must see the forest for the trees, taking a holistic approach to the management of all desired forest values.

B.C. has long been recognized for its reputation as a place of significant natural beauty. Forest reserves are critical to maintaining the visual-quality objectives and recreational values that make this province an international destination in the tourism and commercial back-country industries.

While contributing to the proper functioning condition of watersheds and forest ecosystems, these same reserves generate direct and indirect benefits that equate to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and thousands of jobs each year. Liquidating these assets to sustain just one particular industry for a short period undermines our profession's responsibility to be effective stewards of these public resources.

I'd like to provide some statistics for your consideration. I know that the committee does have a very good wealth of information on the website. I did review some of the documents you already have. Some of the statistics that I'm going to be presenting are going to reiterate some of the information that you've already gathered.

Forests in the Chilliwack forest district alone are estimated at $5.1 billion, or $5,900 to $7,400 per hectare, in ecological benefits. These include typical things like carbon storage, pollution attenuation, runoff control.

The Forest Practices Board identified the implications of losing the ecological benefits of forest reserves when it examined the effects of mountain pine beetle infestation and salvage logging on the hydrology of the Baker Creek drainage, a tributary to the Fraser River near Quesnel.

The study found that peak flow changes likely to result from both the infestation and salvage logging have implications on flooding, channel stability and fish habitat
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in watersheds similar to Baker Creek. Other hydrological maintenance benefits, as well as contributions to local community economies and cultural values, were also identified, regardless of proximity or level of direct reliance on the forest.

That's an issue of ripple effect. In other words, it doesn't matter how close a community may be to the direct forest reserve. The effects and benefits of having that particular resource and asset within a community are substantial.

A study by Simon Fraser University identified that increasing conservation of old-growth forest reserves in the Fraser timber supply area would provide a net benefit to human and non-human resources over those that may be lost from restricting harvest opportunities in 71 of 82 scenarios.

The largest wildlife habitat area designations in B.C.'s interior — 235,000 hectares in Quesnel, 380,000 hectares in Williams Lake and 20,000 hectares in 100 Mile House — are designated for the management and protection of threatened caribou populations. This is an indication of the necessary reserve area sizes that are needed to sustain these at-risk populations.

B.C.'s forests possess an untapped wealth in chemical, plant and bacterial properties for pharmaceutical purposes yet to be fully determined. The discovery of the commercial drug taxol, derived from a chemical in Pacific yew and used widely in the treatment of several cancers, is an example of the resources still awaiting discovery.

Question No. 2. How should decisions regarding potential actions to mitigate the timber supply impacts be made and by whom? Government is ultimately the decision-maker on most land use issues. Those decisions must be based on the best available science and robust credible evidence and information. While it can be argued that the decisions to increase timber-harvesting activities which have led to this supply shortfall should have included an appropriate mitigation strategy in the first place, the problem is now at hand and in need of swift, coordinated action.

The APB feels that registered professionals, independent of government, working within their diverse areas of training and expertise, can provide the necessary legislated accountability, working with decision-makers, local communities, specialists and First Nations to provide the essential information upon which harvesting decisions should be made.

Question No. 3. What cautions and advice do you have for this committee in considering whether and how to mitigate mid-term timber supply? While the politically expedient solution to the timber supply issue may be to open reserve areas to harvest, as resource professionals our members are concerned that the province is about to sacrifice significant biodiversity and other public interest values and economies for short-term timber gains.

Reductions in reserve quality, harvest and wildlife habitat areas or reductions in general wildlife measures could have many detrimental impacts, such as species-at-risk population declines and potential extirpation.

Maintaining diverse forest ecosystems is critical for the maintenance of resiliency in the face of an uncertain climatic future. Forest reserve areas provide a level of diversity and thus help to protect forest ecosystems from the future assaults, such as experienced from the mountain pine beetle.

The association is also cognizant of the existing and projected future effects of climate change and the role that healthy, biodiverse forest communities will play. Numerous studies, many done by the province of B.C., point to the critical role that B.C.'s forests do and will play in mitigating local and international climate change impacts.

The association is accountable to its own climate change policy which dictates that applied biology professionals have a crucial role to play in reducing the adverse impacts of climate change on ecological goods and services by developing innovative, adaptive and environmentally sustainable solutions.

With this in mind, the APB cannot overlook the ramifications of reducing standing and downed wood carbon sinks that the remaining mature forest reserves provide. Effective conservation of these resources is fundamental to B.C. maintaining itself as a leader in dealing with climate change.

Finally, question No. 4. How would you as an individual or a community want to be engaged in these considerations going forward? As a community of practice, registered biology professionals are well placed to provide the necessary balance to economic pressures driving resource demands in B.C. As practitioners spanning a range of disciplines, we work and share members and interests with organizations like the Association of B.C. Forest Professionals and the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists.

The association sees itself having a value-added role in any government policy or decision-making surrounding the sound management and conservation of B.C.'s natural resources.

In closing, the Association of Professional Biology is calling for careful consideration around timber harvesting in existing reserves. This will ensure that the most stringent science-based information is used prior to making management decisions that could have far-reaching adverse consequences for B.C.'s ecological values. Encouraging the application of sound stewardship principles will ensure the best results for the people of this province, our rich natural assets and the economy for the long term.

On behalf of the association I would like to thank you for the opportunity to provide input on this process, and we look forward to assisting the province of B.C. in its
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ongoing policy decision-making process.

J. Rustad (Chair): Pamela, thank you very much. We'll open it up to questions from members.

N. Macdonald (Deputy Chair): Thank you very much for the presentation. We as a committee had an opportunity near Quesnel to go on the ground, and we were taken around by a number of professionals with the Forest Service in the Quesnel area. There was one time we went in with a gentleman who I believe was a biologist — I think he was a biologist — and he took us into an area set aside for ungulate winter range, and the enthusiasm that he had in pointing out the different things that had been done was pretty inspiring. That was a very enjoyable period of time with him.

At the time we were told about the values that were still there in areas that had been heavily impacted by the pine beetle, but maybe to put on record from a biologist's perspective, we have old-growth areas heavily impacted by pine beetle. What sort of values are retained? Do we understand what is going on in those areas? Do they still retain the values that they were originally set aside for? If changed, what new values do they retain? Or is it something that more work needs to be done on?

What's your sense on that? Maybe that's too big of a question, but one of the things….

N. Macdonald (Deputy Chair): You can choose. You can choose the one that's most interesting to you to answer.

Consider an approach called resiliency theory. In that case, systems naturally undergo change. It's part of natural processes. Most of the forests in this province are approximately 15,000 years old. They've emerged since the last glaciation period. In that particular time they've gone through a lot of catastrophic changes, ones that we have no knowledge about, because we weren't around to actually record it.

Mountain pine beetle cycles are part of a natural process. The issue is understanding how that is now being driven through, say, anthroprogenic issues like climate change. How is that being accelerated? The question that we need to answer is: how do we retain certain values if that's what society desires to have retained within our forest ecological communities here, and how much of that is actually natural process that, with the right amount of vision and foresight and the amount of science that we can gather, need to be left alone without intervention?

I think we're still beginning to understand that particular issue, as to what we touch and what we leave alone, because nature can actually rebound quite quickly, as long as most of the parts are left in place. I often think about Aldo Leopold, who talked about the fact that the best thing you can do is retain all the cogs and wheels before you start tinkering with something. We need to understand what all the pieces are that need to be there and whether or not we actually need to intervene in certain situations.

N. Macdonald (Deputy Chair): A second question. There was a time when we had a lot of people on the ground that worked for the province and gathered information, including not only foresters but including biologists. I mean, in an awful lot of the communities that we've been to from my own experience, we just don't have those people on the ground.

We don't really know as much as we need to know in a time of climate change. With all of the things that are going on, the province — which, as you said, is responsible for stewardship — has simply gone too far in getting rid of that capacity. Is that your sense?

P. Zevit: Well, the association has responded to issues in the past. As an example, the BEC classification system was a resource that was used widely by forest professionals and biologists. There were cutbacks when the Ministry of Forests was still the Ministry of Forests. It's actually maintaining that system, and it's a vital resource and knowledge base. That's an example of where there have been potential effects on the ability to gather the right amount of information and put it to good use on the ground.

We definitely, as an organization, have been very concerned about the decrease in capacity in regards to scientific expertise in government — that's across the board; if we look federally, too, it's the same issue — and what that actually means for our ability to be good stewards of the resources that we have responsibility for. If there's not the sufficient gathering of information, we can't make appropriate decisions.

Climate change is a huge wild card. I have a number of colleagues who are working on trying to project what the potential impacts are going to be in many of the areas that have been impacted by mountain pine beetle. The
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question is how that research gets applied and whether or not government will actually use that research appropriately if they're not doing it themselves.

B. Stewart: Thanks very much, Pamela. You cite some numbers, which is just under 650,000 hectares of land that's been set aside in wildlife habitat area designations, especially in Quesnel and Williams Lake. When we were doing the tour up in Quesnel, of course, we were shown some of the harvesting practices, where there is this kind of interface, not necessarily right in wildlife habitat corridors, to mitigate the practice to be able to leave the lichens and other things that are essential.

My question, really, to you: from a biologist's point of view, is there a methodology that you can see any type of harvesting in ungulate areas where there is that sensitivity, which may be more sensitive than moose, which I think it is, for caribou? Can you help me understand if there is a way that we can do anything in those areas? How do we have the two interface…?

B. Stewart: Well, no, not necessarily. I'm asking you the question…. We heard about selective harvesting practices, but I'm not really certain, because of the things that caribou are dependent on, that that is possible. That's what I'm asking.

P. Zevit: I don't have a great deal of knowledge with caribou management issues, so I can only go by what I have experienced. I would definitely defer to those who actually work in caribou management, as a specialization, to really answer the question effectively.

My understanding is that they are an extremely sensitive species. As you've stated, they're much more sensitive than other ungulates, to a great degree. I don't have enough knowledge to be able to say whether or not certain types of harvesting can still happen without sort of crossing a tipping point or threshold for those particular populations in regard to food supply or disturbance reactions, and things like that.

I'd rather not answer your question — because I can't, from an expertise standpoint — than give you information that I'm uncertain of.

B. Routley: Thank you, Pamela, for your presentation. In terms of the biologists association, do you actually have a goal or a percentage of the forest land base that you believe is acceptable in terms of protecting the biological values in the forest? We've heard a lot about constraints or other values. I assume you're in the other-values camp rather than constraints.

I have heard some environmentalists say that we need more — like 50 percent. In some areas we have like 20 percent. We're actually being asked to examine closely, if I can be so blunt, the guts and feathers of what we've got in these constrained or other-values areas, and examine whether there are possibilities within them. I think I'm hearing you say: "Walk really carefully around that."

B. Routley: In terms of the climate change and the pine beetle, you hear people saying: "Well, this could be converted to grassland." If that's true, if the biologists are thinking it's going to be converted to grassland, maybe we should go get it now. What do you think about that?

P. Zevit: That's a loaded question. To answer your first question: no, the association does not have like a particular policy or position statement around how much area needs to be retained at a provincial scale. We would defer to whatever the science is telling us, and often that's based on particular species or species communities. It can vary quite a bit. Different species have different requirements for the level of landscape connectivity and patch or reserve size in order to maintain their populations and remain resilient.

In nature redundancy is very important, so having backup populations all over the place helps to mitigate and offset problems where you lose a population due to some catastrophic event or some anthropogenic effect, which is human disturbance, for the most part.

Can you rephrase the second part of your question for me again? Do you remember what you asked me?

I mentioned at the beginning that our provincial assets right now are about 15,000 years old. At the beginning we didn't instantaneously start off with forests. There's been a lot of transition in the landscape, based on previous climate cycles and previous changes in the landscape.

It's a very difficult or fine line to tread to say we think we can project what this ecosystem is going to look like or respond to, from a physiological perspective, down the road because of the impacts that are happening now. I would be cautious about doing that and then moving forward on actually enabling that particular transition to happen, because we don't know all of the particular components or the complexities that may play out in that particular situation.

I realize there is an issue of…. There are a lot of trade-
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offs that need to be considered in this particular situation. Sometimes there is the viewpoint that the perfect may be the enemy of the good. In other words, if we spend too much time from a precautionary standpoint, we may miss certain opportunities or windows.

As a scientist, I think we need to understand how natural systems fluctuate and transition on their own before we start intervening and actually forcing those types of events to happen simply because we think that may be the case.

E. Foster: Thank you very much, Pamela. You could have saved a lot of your time and energy, because I would suggest that including the major licensees, forest professionals, biology professionals…. Everybody wants us to stay out of the reserves. You could have all got together and sent one letter. But I really appreciate the scientific approach to this, so thank you very much.

I've got a couple of questions. You talked about the natural evolution of things. We, this committee, have got a task here. We need to certainly look after the environment, heed everything that you've put into this report, as have the forest professionals and many others. We also have to look….

We go to Burns Lakes and sit with several hundred people who've watched their livelihood go up in smoke, literally. Climate change is, depending on who you talk to, a result of human interference, global warming — who knows what? It's real. How do we factor all that in? I ask you as a scientist: where's our balance here?

It's fine to say that in the natural course of events, pine trees die. That's what they do when they're a hundred years old. They fall down. That was great, and they burned before four million people depended on them for their living.

I'm asking you as a scientist to help us here. We've got a tough decision to make as far as our recommendations go, and government, beyond that, will have a really tough decision to make. Where is that balance? How do we balance looking after the environment — which we need to do, and I don't think we don't — with the fact that we've got a whole lot of people that have got to feed their kids and send them to school?

Maybe at the end of the day…. There's obviously not going to be enough timber. We know that the timber has died. We know that we're going to have to make changes as a society, not government. I mean, if there are no trees, there's no mill. It's pretty simple. We still need to have all the facts, great science, but we've got people in this mix now.

P. Zevit: That's the reason I'm a biologist. If there weren't people issues on the planet, I probably would be out of work.

P. Zevit: In a way, you've answered your own question. I mean, there are trade-offs that will need to happen.

From a science perspective the role of professionals like myself is to provide you with the best available information that we can acquire. Sometimes it unfortunately takes more time than may be politically palatable to gather that information, so there is an expedience factor, especially when you're dealing with communities that are hard hit by particular events on the landscape. They don't necessarily have ten years to wait for us to get the answer.

At the end of the day, it is going to be a political decision, and as scientists, we can provide you with the information. We can, in some realms, even advocate, which is not typically something that scientists do. But I work for…. The association is a member that advocates on behalf of our members for good practice.

The decision that you make is going to be one that you make based on all of these factors. Now, how you achieve that balance is going to be all about how you use the information that we give you. We can only recommend as much as possible that you consider all of these factors, recognizing that there are going to be trade-offs at the end of the day.

In the ideal world there would solutions that benefit both human and non-human resources, but ultimately, I think we all want to see resilient, healthy forest ecosystems in this province. There's a lot of information that you've gathered as a committee, as well, that points you in the direction as to how to attain that. How we dovetail the human factor in that is, again, going to be a political decision more than anything else.

J. Rustad (Chair): We're just about out of time, unfortunately. We've got three more questions, so we'll try to go through them very quickly if we can. I've got myself on the list next.

Area-based management versus volume-based management. The way that a big chunk of our forests are acted on today is on a volume basis. There is a discussion or argument around whether or not we should be considering moving to more area-based types of management. Have you worked on both types in B.C.? What are your thoughts on the two methodologies?

P. Zevit: Not personally, no. I did ask this question of members of our board, including our president, who do work in the forestry industry. The feedback I got was that area-based tenures tend to promote more accountability and are the preferred route to go in regards to looking at how we manage forests in the future. There is a sugges-
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tion that there is not a lot of evidence that volume-based tenures produce superior results over area-based tenures.

There may be a need to relook at the way that the allocation is managed now, as part of an overall reformation. I believe, based on reviews that I've seen through other sectors, that there is a sort of call for that type of reformation. It's been in the queue for a while.

B. Stewart: Thanks, Pamela. I'm going to ask one more question. As a professional, I wonder about some of the things that…. You talk about the drainage area around Baker Creek. We were hearing about some of the choices in terms of brushing, or keeping weeds down. I'm wondering about the biologists' view in terms of using herbicide control in some of those areas.

We had an interesting presentation from a fellow by the name of Dennis Loxton who was promoting a more natural way, with sheep.

B. Stewart: Okay, I didn't know that. Anyways, it's an interesting thought. I wonder about the herbicide part, if it's something that you have an opinion as to…. Obviously, we're talking about something that's a selective herbicide. It must be, obviously, if it's not killing the trees that we want left behind. What about from a biologist's point of view, in the forests?

P. Zevit: I do work on invasive species issues quite a bit here on the Lower Mainland. There's always the dilemma, regardless of whether it's an issue of human perceptions around the use of pesticides or whether or not it's about resource management issues. The province does have a very robust integrated pest management program, which looks at all the various options and when you can actually trigger certain applications.

I'm not as familiar with silvicultural practices, but definitely, I have seen a lot of promise in regards to using natural types of control mechanisms. My understanding is that there are always going to be situations where you need to, potentially, call in a chemical warfare type of approach.

That's where you need to draw on adequate expertise around making those decisions and look at the potential for where there may be natural processes or biocontrols that can be applied to deal with particular plant pests or invertebrate pests.

I'm not sure how you deal…. I obviously wouldn't be spraying mule deer and whitetail deer with pesticides in order to get rid of them because they're eating your seedlings. That's a different situation in regards to control. I'm assuming you're talking mainly about plant species?

P. Zevit: My understanding is that in the forestry sector there has been a very longstanding look at using integrated pest management in the past. Did that answer your question?

H. Bains: Pamela, thank you very much for the presentation. I think it is actually a luxury, as far as I'm concerned, for this committee to have professionals come and give us the information that we need so that we can make decisions based on, as you put it, science and all the facts.

I think one of the challenges we face is that, when you go a little deeper than that, sometimes the professionals themselves don't agree on facts and direction that we should take. For example, yesterday we heard a presentation from a professional forester, and he questioned the decisions that were made in the '70s and '80s based on the life cycle of pine. He said: "What were they thinking?"

I think that's the dilemma that we face. On the surface, making a blanket statement that all the decisions should be based on the current science and all the facts available to us…. Then we hear different views based on the same facts. They are all looking at the same science, and they don't agree.

I guess that's the challenge for us. How do we actually get to that point we need to get to — where, yes, this is what we need, and yes, we've got the information, and yes, now we can make a decision based on that?

P. Zevit: The beauty and frustration of being involved in the sciences is always dealing with counter-arguments about certain things. It also points to the fact that we're still always in a position of knowledge-gathering in the work that we do. I think it's important to actually look at all of those counter-arguments as part of the decision-making process.

It's kind of hard to answer that, because my response would be to use the best available science to actually filter your decision, or to use professionals or those who are actually involved in particular specializations to help you and guide you in the decision-making and filter out some of the noise that may be there.

I can't speak to what was presented yesterday, so in that respect, it would be inappropriate for me to try to address that argument.

H. Bains: To add on to that, we mentioned here a tour that we took in Quesnel. One of the areas that they showed us was how they had logged. It's kind of a checkered design. You could see it from the air. That was to enhance caribou habitat. They said this is proven, that this produced the food that caribou need and that they like this light area and go around and all that stuff.

If that's proven based on some science, then can we not
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use that science and that kind of experiment elsewhere as we are talking about some of these areas that we may need to get into, if we need to?

P. Zevit: The short answer would be that if the evidence is robust and stands up to question and introspection and is demonstrating that a particular population or species is actually able to sustain itself based on that particular land use activity or that particular methodology for management, then I can't see any reason why it couldn't be used. But you also need to remember that things change from areas within the province to other areas.

The focus of this committee is around mountain pine beetle, but if you look at the vast amount of biogeoclimatic zones that occur in this province and the different kinds of forest communities that we have…. Then you have similar species who have particular disturbance thresholds in one area that may not respond in the same way in other areas.

I know that probably sounds more convoluted, but science doesn't always give us the explicit, black-and-white answer that we want. As a species we need to learn how to figure out how to use the grey areas effectively.

J. Rustad (Chair): Pamela, thank you very much for your presentation. Thank you for the information.

My apologies to our future presenters, as we started a little late, and we allowed this to go a little over. I apologize for that.

M. Semeniuk: Mr. Rustad, Mr. Macdonald, members of the committee, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for the opportunity to speak today. The Interior Lumber Manufacturers Association is a forestry association of 14 firms, with operations that collectively span the southern interior of British Columbia from Merritt to the Alberta border and from Salmon Arm south to the U.S. border.

Many of our members operate in green timber supply areas less impacted by the mountain pine beetle. We're able to convert this high-quality timber into high-value products, thereby employing more people per cubic metre of timber than are employed in other parts of the B.C. Interior.

We acknowledge the primary focus of your committee as timber supply in areas heavily impacted by the mountain pine beetle. This includes the Merritt and Kamloops TSAs, where some of our members hold tenure. However, timber supply shortages are evident in areas of the southern Interior that have not been affected by the mountain pine beetle to the same degree. Our objective in this presentation is to make you aware of the problem.

Our presentation is structured as follows. Firstly, we define some terms in order for you to understand our arguments as completely as possible. Second, we describe a set of guiding principles for your deliberations. Lastly, we summarize our arguments with a strong message for comprehensive review of timber supply in the southern Interior.

I'll start with the timber supply — some definitions and background. Timber supply and annual allowable cut aren't the same things. There are two definitions of timber supply under certified professional foresters: physical and economical. Physical timber supply is the forecast of merchantable timber that is estimated in timber supply reviews within the timber-harvesting land base, the THLB in shortened version. It is the stock of merchantable timber estimated in the reviews.

At any point in time a subset of the physical supply is the economic supply — that portion that can be harvested economically. It will vary considerably with end-product prices for forest products and other market conditions. The point here is that these two concepts of timber supply are often rolled into one, but it is important to distinguish them and to note that industry requires economic timber in order to stay viable.

We also wish to distinguish between timber supply and the annual allowable cut, the AAC in shortened term. Timber supply is calculated or estimated through a complicated process that involves net-downs to arrive at the THLB — consideration of the factors such as VQOs on the THLB and forecasts of future yields from second-growth stands.

There are many factors that contribute to a forecast of timber supply, but they are calculated. The AAC is a choice, a determination made by the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations. In the case of timber supply areas and tree farm licences, the chief forester determines the AAC. So one is calculated; one is more of a decision-making process.

Setting the AAC is a decision of crucial importance to both the forest industry and dependent communities. It requires hard choices between economic, environmental and aesthetic values, and contrary to popular belief, there is no correct AAC for the forest. The AAC is not some magic number or a measurable property of a forest that can be calculated by a formula. As I said, AACs are chosen or determined, in the language of the Forest Act, not calculated.

The cut control or rate of cut, policy-wise, until the time of the mountain pine beetle infestation, was expressed in the following way. Assuming the current AAC is above the long-run sustained yield, maintain the AAC at the current level as long as possible, then decline to a long-range sustained yield at a maximum rate of 10 percent per decade. Then set the AAC equal to the long-range sustainable yield in perpetuity.
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The mountain pine beetle infestation changed all that, at least in supply blocks heavily affected by the beetle. This policy was abandoned as AACs were increased to capture some of the lodgepole pine mortality. In supply blocks not heavily hit by the beetle, this AAC policy has more or less been maintained. The ILMA maintains that this policy of maintaining the AAC as high as possible before declining at a rate of 10 percent per decade to the long-range sustained yield be maintained.

I'll move on to factors affecting the timber supply. It's useful to think of timber supply having a number of dimensions, in the sense that supply expands or contracts along these dimensions. They include the size of the land base; the site index, which is a measure of fertility of a site; silviculture; and merchantability of the tree.

Each of these dimensions can be adjusted through expenditures, either investments or by incurring additional operational costs, and each has a margin beyond which further expenditure is economically counterproductive. These margins move in response to the cycles and trends of the demand for forest products in that a higher price for roundwood or lower costs of harvesting inputs can justify larger investments or higher costs of recovery.

The most important determinant of timber supply is the size of the land base or, more technically, the timber-harvesting land base, the THLB. In the Kootenay Lake TSA, an area of specific interest to some ILMA members, the THLB has been declining steadily since 1992, from 296,890 hectares to its current level of 203,540 hectares in 2010. That's a reduction of some 31 percent over that time frame. Some of these reductions accommodated the Kootenay-Boundary land use plan objectives and other environmental services.

We have now reached a point where the existing industrial structure cannot find enough economic timber to meet existing capacity. Other TSAs in the southern Interior face similar situations.

Site index is the second most important determinant of timber supply. Site index is the projected height on an index, at an age, of dominant and co-dominant trees of a given species on a site. The faster a stand of trees grows to that age, the higher the site index.

A third determinant of timber supply is incremental silviculture. Previous analysis has indicated that incremental silviculture treatments may increase yields, but the financial efficiency of these treatments is questionable due to the very long time between the expenditure and the return and our still limited knowledge of the growth yield and response to treatment of managed stands of timber.

The last determinant of timber supply is the merchantability of a tree. Primary recovery still focuses on either sawlogs or pulp logs in a take-and-pay regime. Other fibre is still available at steeply increasing costs. The current focus of government bioenergy policies is on this remaining stock of fibre.

A very long process has resulted in the current high level of forest management standards that are embodied in our forest management regulations and resultant practices. B.C. is recognized as a world leader in this regard. Examples include high forest-road-construction standards and basic silviculture treatments that establish new forests as soon as possible. These standards should absolutely be maintained.

Higher-level plans, such as the Kootenay-Boundary land use plan, were completed some 15 to 20 years ago. Some of them have been amended from time to time, but none of them have been reviewed comprehensively, to our knowledge. In our opinion, these plans need to be reviewed to search for more efficient ways to meet established resource management zone targets, which may simultaneously create opportunity to access more timber.

Opportunities may arise to alter the flow of harvest between TSAs by adjusting their administrative boundaries. Differing timber age class distributions within adjacent TSAs are one reason for such opportunity. The ILMA does not recommend this course of action. It does not increase timber supply per se. It only redistributes the existing supply from one TSA to another, delaying the inevitable problem. We recommend that existing TSA boundaries be maintained and AACs not be transferred from one to the other.

Many of the environmental objectives of higher-level plans have been established by creating reserves in perpetuity. The implicit assumption is that forests are somehow static. Any opportunity for forest land managers to manage a more complete land base is eliminated with this approach. Managers are left to manage their THLB only, so it's operating in a bit of a box. I suspect that's one way to put it. Yet we know that forests are dynamic, especially many B.C. Interior forests that have natural disturbance ecology generated by insects and/or fire. Trees grow every year, get eaten and are burned to the ground regardless.

A different land management approach than the one described has been experimented with in B.C. in the past and offers some insight for your committee to consider. The idea incorporates the entire land base and the dynamics of the forest in the planning process and establishes a clear set of forest management objectives, including an AAC and targets for different types of habitat and environmental services, but it allows land classes to change objectives as the plan marches through space and time.

The net result is that some land becomes available to supply timber. Fewer lines are drawn on maps, and managers are provided with the opportunity to manage a more complete land base. This type of planning comes at a cost in the form of comprehensive monitoring practices to ensure targets are met, but it is an approach with some promise that should be examined again for application.
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In future situations where the provincial government is considering land withdrawals from the THLB, complete comprehensive economic analysis of the proposals. It is important to understand that the decisions being made have both costs and benefits, now and in the future, and they must be estimated so that decision-makers can understand more clearly the likely trade-offs that will occur with their pending decisions. That's really a call for a more complete economic analysis of the decision-making process.

The mountain caribou recovery plan is a recent example where the Kootenay-Boundary land use plan was amended to delete timber-harvesting land base from the various TSAs and TFLs in order to provide more critical habitat for mountain caribou. The ILMA supported the plan, with two basic conditions: first, that all the elements of the plan be implemented and, second, that there be no net loss of timber supply for ILMA companies affected by the plan. To date the plan has not been implemented fully, although there has been a lot of work done.

Some ILMA firms have lost critical portions of their operating areas to caribou habitat. Their losses have not been redressed, even though there was a ministerial promise to do so, the no-net-loss promise. This must be rectified soon.

An assessment of the plan is beyond the scope of our comments today. However, in our opinion, an economic analysis would have eliminated some of its more costly, risky elements and forced government to critically examine and alter what has been implemented.

The likely outcome would have been no net loss of the THLB in the management units with very small herds of caribou. It is the THLB, the land base where harvesting operations are conducted, that is the most dominant factor for timber supply, short or medium term. Therefore, we recommend that more comprehensive economic analysis of land use decisions be completed before the decisions are implemented, in order to better understand the trade-offs that are likely to occur.

Frequent commentary from foresters involved in land use planning speaks of the gaps between the recent timber supply review forecasts and their ability to locate that timber on the ground. There are a number of likely reasons for this discrepancy, including inadequate forest inventories and/or inaccurate forecasts of growth and yield.

Current forest inventories are considered adequate for application at a strategic level for large timber supply blocks. Accuracy of information provided is considered reasonable at this scale. However, there are many demands on the forest land base that require a higher level of accuracy on smaller areas of land than currently observed in these inventories.

Planning has become much more operational, especially with the advent of the modern GIS and spatially explicit modelling capability. Therefore, the issue of uncertainty with respect to…. Basic inventory data — including site classification, extent of decay, and growth and yield functions — are drawn into question.

We believe that continued investment in these basic inventories is crucial, since the forest land base is subject to increasing demands from many directions, thereby taxing an inventory system that was never designed to provide information at levels or scales now required. We therefore recommend a review of these inventories against current applications, rather than their original design. Are they good enough to do the job that is now required? We don't think so.

We do not recommend investments of public funds in intensive forest management such as fertilization or other silvicultural techniques as a way of mitigating shortfalls in timber supply without first knowing or having a reasoned idea of both the yield response from the intended treatment and the net present value of that treatment.

A still too prevalent view is that incremental silviculture will somehow provide a significant contribution to timber supply problems facing the province. In our opinion, that simply is not the case.

Typically, marginal stands of timber — or problem forest types, as they're called in the TSRs — are deleted from timber supply analysis, since they're borderline economic and rarely harvested.

In the context of the mountain pine beetle infestation, lodgepole pine–leading stands on good and medium sites would have been included in TSRs had they not been killed by the beetle. They have become problem forest types since the remaining timber, albeit merchantable, has fallen into a problem forest–type definition.

The ILMA recommends that these forest types be examined with the view of returning them to TSR analyses. It's likely the remaining timber of other species is merchantable and economic to recover. These stands should then be monitored for harvesting activity before the next TSR.

In summary, there are no silver-bullet solutions with timber supply in the southern Interior. Supply issues are becoming increasingly acute, as we have already discussed specific to the Kootenay Lake TSA. There are options, but exercising them depends on the will of government to review the status of higher-level plans against their environmental, social and economic objectives.

Increase land use planning flexibility, provide cost-benefit analysis of land use decisions before THLB is withdrawn, recommend improvements to forest inventories and growth and yield projections, review likely yields and the net present value of silviculture treatments before any investments are made, and include marginal stands of timber, as defined above, in TSR calculations. That was a big sentence.

N. Macdonald (Deputy Chair): Thank you very much for the presentation. Of course, one of the areas that was in our terms of reference was looking at some of the land use plans. We've certainly heard a lot from that. What we've pretty consistently heard is around the amount of work that was done with those plans and, if it was going to be reopened, that there be a process that's respectful of the work that was done.

Now, the one area that you talked about where there have been changes was with the Cariboo. I think one of the points you made is that despite what you were promised, the outcome was different than that. So it sort of points to the need to make sure that any process going forward is going to have outcomes that are different, that everybody gets an outcome that they expect.

When you suggest that we could go back into land use plans, what sort of process are we talking about so that we get the outcomes that are predictable? Like I say, I know Eric and I were somewhat involved in these processes, and they were very time-consuming, with a lot of trade-offs and quite a lot of angst amongst different groups.

Are you suggesting going into something whole-scale like that? Or what sort of process are you suggesting that would be timely but would lead to results that people would look at and say, "Okay, we're happy with that; that's what we expected," or "That's fair"?

J. Hackett: First, your committee is tasked, of course, with the issue of timber supply. The single biggest thing that you can do to affect timber supply is the land base that you're operating on. With regards to higher-level plans, then, that would be the objective: whether you can find area within a higher-level plan that is currently constrained to be able to put it back into a timber-harvesting land base.

What we said in our comments was: at least, don't open up these plans. Internally, within government, review these plans to see if there are more flexible and smarter ways of doing the planning and meeting the existing constraints or higher-level plan objectives, environmental objectives.

E. Foster: A quick question on the areas that have been impacted and then dropped out of the timber supply. Do you have any kind of a best-case guess as to what kind of volume we're talking about in those?

J. Hackett: Are you talking about the discussion around the Kootenay Lake TSA and the…?

E. Foster: Well, no. I'm talking about…. We've taken a lot of stands out of the timber supply review because they've been hit by the beetle. You're suggesting putting them back into the timber supply review so they can be calculated into the AAC.

J. Hackett: Sorry, I didn't understand the context of your question. I don't have those estimates, no.

H. Bains: I think the theme continues. We've heard before that the inventory is not adequate, and you are adding to that as well. I guess that's a task that the ministry has to take on and see where we go with it. I agree that without knowing what's there, how do you make the right decision?

The other part you mentioned here was also mentioned, not before the committee but out there on the ground — that sometimes the ministry officials identify stands, but they're not actually there. You can't find it on the ground.

Now, one explanation I heard is that it's there and that they say it's not there because it's not economical for them to get to. Is that the true or the right statement? Is the stand not there — period? Or when you say it's not there, is it because it's not economically viable to get to?

M. Semeniuk: I haven't really heard a lot of discussion around that particular point, that there are stands there that we believe are there but are not actually there. I would think it would relate to the economic ability to access those stands.

J. Hackett: It could be both. The typing could be wrong, or it could be the right typing, but it's a marginal stand or an uneconomic stand.

H. Bains: Did I misunderstand? I thought you made
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that statement that sometimes the timber supply area is identified but that it's not there. I thought that's what I heard from you. Is that not your…?

J. Hackett: No, we said basically that at the scale that you're now required to do more comprehensive planning, there are inaccuracies in the inventory. Either they are inaccuracies in that it's the wrong typing, wrong photo interpretation of those particular polygons, stand types, or as I said, they are marginal stands.

J. Rustad (Chair): We are just about out of time. There are two more questions. I'm going to ask one, and we'll see how long it takes to answer. We'll see if we've got time for another, if it's very brief.

Area-based management. What are your opinions on area-based versus volume-based? I know in the southern Interior there are a number of TFLs and other types of tenures that are in that place. I'm wondering about your opinion on whether or not we should be considering area-based management.

M. Semeniuk: Well, I'll give a bit of a short version, and Jim can expand again.

I think, generally speaking, as was described by the previous speaker, area-based management does provide more obligations and probably results in a better management of the forests in general. From that perspective, I guess I personally would be in favour of an area-based approach. However, in our particular operating areas there are a lot of complications in actually achieving that end.

J. Hackett: Well, I don't think we could arrive at consensus within the association, answering that particular question, but some observations. First, I think the inference is that area-based management might lead to better silviculture which then, in turn, could lead to more yields in timber. We've already commented on that, so I think from that point of view, spending the effort to go into area-based management is questionable.

I also think that efforts could be better spent in other activities to better estimate the supply of timber rather than concentrating on all the effort that would be involved in going to area-based tenure. I think it's a very controversial subject. It would be very problematic in how, for a given TSA, to be able to break it up and convert from volume- to area-based.

As I say, as an association it was very hard to come to a consensus on that position. Our view was that your time is better spent on some of the other issues around timber supply.

J. Rustad (Chair): I'm sorry. We are out of time, but thank you very much for your presentation.

M. Cameron: Good morning. I'm going to do my best to bring you back on schedule here.

I'd like to start by thanking you for the opportunity but also by paraphrasing Monty Python. I'm not a lumberjack, and I hope that's okay.

My name is Mark Cameron. I'm here for the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada. We represent some of the 9,700 workers in the pulp and paper industry in this province.

You're here talking about solid wood. We want your waste, the half of each log milled that ends up as a residual, because both wood chips and wood waste from sawmills are essential — to sawmills as revenue and to the pulp mills as raw material.

Your committee has asked about the values and principles that should guide the decisions regarding timber supply, and I want to give you our answers to that question. I think our answers are going to make your job more difficult, rather than easier, because first of all, we don't believe that we need to start another war in the woods. We have to respect our First Nations and the protected areas — your first challenge.

The second thing is that it's time, in our view, for industry to start to do more with less. Ontario creates one full-time job for every 205 cubic metres cut. Quebec creates one full-time job for every 298 cubic metres cuts. Now, I know that there's a lot more hardwood harvested there, but still. In B.C. we create one full-time job for every 1,189 cubic metres of wood cut, according to the Natural Resources Canada 2010 annual report.

We don't think that's acceptable, and it's got to go up. What to do? With the pine beetle crisis, industry has churned through a lot more trees than it would have otherwise. We think that it's time to take a long-term view, one that looks past the mid-level timber supply, looks past the polls and looks past the next quarterly results.

Our first recommendation is to reduce raw log exports by reducing the desire for export. We recommend the implementation of an export tax, and we support the United Steelworkers' call for the government to double the fee-in-lieu.

Rob Kozak, an associate professor of sustainable business management at UBC's faculty of forestry, asks why one of the world's leading manufacturers of Douglas fir window frames — 1,500 employees strong — is located in the southern prairies of Manitoba and why the partially processed lumber coming to that plant comes not from
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B.C. but from Oregon.

In the past decade we believe that the export of raw logs has been a significant contributing factor in the loss of value-added jobs here in B.C.

Our members are worried, though, about what industries we do support. We support the expansion of bioenergy, but it cannot be at the expense of the current industry, and it should not put existing mills at risk due to lack of access to wood waste.

Finally, we have to plant more trees that will grow up healthy. There's an old saying that the best time to do that was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.

According to an article written by the minister, published in the Province, the harvest is 155,000 hectares each year. According to him, since 2005, $236 million has been spent on surveys and on reforesting 50,000 hectares. He estimates the need is much greater. Two million hectares, according to his estimate, needs to be reforested, and we've only reforested 50,000 — plus the industry, of course.

In our view, the problem is clear. We are not planting enough, and because of the free-to-grow requirements, we plant a lot of lodgepole pine — 55 percent of all the trees planted, according to a CCPA report in August of last year. The surveys of the replanting, such as they are, show that with die-off, it's not necessarily growing into a usable resource for the future.

Then what's been referred to as the elephant in the room — climate change. A recent study by scientists at UBC and Oregon State University suggests that by 2080, lodgepole pine trees will likely only survive on 17 percent of the sites where the trees are currently found in western North America.

To supervise the forests and make the decisions, we recommend a properly funded and properly staffed provincial Forest Service. According to Ben Parfitt of the CCPA, inventory jobs are down from 188 in the '90s in the Forest Service to 50 in 2004 to 39 after that, and the budget has dropped to $3 million.

Values and principles to guide your decisions. To sum it up, we need to get more from every tree, rather than ship them out. We need to plant a whole lot more, and we need to do it effectively.

I want to apologize because this presentation really has nothing new in it. We've been talking about adding value, good inventory of forests and replanting since the 1980s. But the crisis is upon us now, and in our view, it's time to take some action.

It's interesting. When we were in Smithers, we heard that logs currently being exported from the Kispiox…. It's about five hours to the west coast of B.C., to be exported to China, and it's about five hours to Burns Lake. It is ironic that we have a community in crisis for fibre supply at the same time as the province is happily signing off on logs being surplus to our needs. Apparently, that's something that's still okay to do — to sign off that they're surplus to the needs of B.C.

When you go back and look at the historical record on why the conditions were put in place in the first place, it's pretty clear that the province was attempting to have a mechanism to ensure that our B.C. mills were given the supply needs that they required for fibre. It's been a hot political issue — the whole issue of even on the coast of B.C. discovering mills that say they can't get the wood that they need under the existing conditions. I agree with you that something needs to be done.

In terms of the land use planning, I want it to be clear that the position of your union is that you don't want to open up another war in the woods, and you see it as potential.

E. Foster: I want to go up to the log exports as well. When we were in…. I don't remember which town it was now, a town of the people of West Fraser. Anyway, they blocked a sale for 10,000 cubic metres. They blocked and took the wood into the Smithers-Houston areas a year and a half ago. They picked it up in Rupert, hauled it there, and they lost a considerable amount of money on every metre they brought in there. That's why they're not blocking them, because they're losing money on it.

The other thing, too, on that is — and I bring this question to you — if there was a dollar to be made with those logs, somebody would be milling them. Certainly, the wood that's going in the chuck doesn't fit the profile of the mills in the Interior, where they've all changed their operations to handle the smaller-diameter pine.

Although if we had jobs, those logs should be going to the local mills, and I get that. But if you talk to the mill operators, they can't use them. I know there are arguments that people are hauling logs past mills, and they're going into the chuck, and they're going overseas, and so on. For the most part….

Then the other mills that are saying they want the wood — they want it delivered for free. You can't do it. If somebody opened a mill up on the north coast that could use the logs, they'd mill them. That's why the mills have closed down up there. They couldn't utilize the product.

As much as I agree that if we could put people to work with those logs, they should stay here and put them to work, I think that's a pretty strong blanket statement, and I think there needs to be clarification on that. Again, in West Fraser they've got pretty deep pockets, and they'll bring wood in from where they can get it. But when
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they're losing wood on every stick they bring into the mill, it's pretty tough to do it. Anyway, that's my comment on that.

N. Macdonald (Deputy Chair): Thank you very much for the presentation. I mean, obviously, an awful lot of what you've said — that we'd be spot on in terms of the raw log export discussion — is something that we've debated long and hard. I would say that the Steelworkers did a poll that had 70 percent of British Columbians agreeing with what you say. There's a strong emotional sense that we need to do more. I think, as Eric has said, there are complexities to it that we need to get our head around.

We've been trying to figure out…. I think one of the things we will look at, with some of the issues towards Smithers and towards Burns Lake, is to whether there is opportunity there. I think, as MLA Routley has talked about, there's wood that is moving five hours, but it's moving to the coast rather than to areas where there's an identified shortage.

I think the other thing that we've talked about is around waste in general. There is a waste issue. There is opportunity for value-added manufacturers such as what you represent. We collectively, as politicians, haven't figured out the mechanisms to move into the fibre basket. What you've said about not opening the war in the woods — I think that's another thing we've heard repeatedly. These land use decisions have to be moved on carefully.

Really, thank you for the presentations. I think for many of us, you're preaching to the converted, and we appreciate you for putting that on record, so thank you.

M. Cameron: You're welcome. A comment, if I may, around the raw log export. Your comments are about if there was a buck to be made…. I think that's the challenge that the committee faces, certainly in terms of mid-term, but also in terms of the long term.

We have to find a way that it's not easier, more profitable, to ship the jobs and the logs out of the province and into the truck. We have to find policy and make policy that's going to keep those jobs and those logs here.

D. Barnett: I thank you for your presentation. Back to my colleague over here, about the exports. I think one of the concerns is…. I'll ask you. A lot of this timber comes from private land. Of course, I don't believe that anybody that owns private land should be told where they can market their product, whether it's cherries or sheep or blackberries. Basically, if we start telling private land owners where to market their product, I think we create a lot more problems. What is your view on that?

M. Cameron: I'm a little outside of my expertise, but I can give you my view on that, which is that if I own a house and you tell me how I can build my deck…. Fundamentally, I have a disagreement with you saying that you can't do that. I think that you can do that, and with respect, I think that you should do it. It's the responsible thing to do for this province.

H. Bains: Mark, thank you very much for a very good presentation — very concise and very informative. I think on this issue here, about logs, we've heard during our tour of the province quite a bit: "Whatever you do, don't steal from the future to deal with the short-term solutions that the committee may be looking at."

When those logs leave, the comments are being made that they couldn't make a buck on it today. The time will come when the log prices go up and that you can make a buck on that, but then those logs won't be there. I think that's basically what is happening. We're stealing from the future to deal with some quick economic gains by somebody.

The other part on that is that locally here, in my backyard, in Surrey, they wanted to block those logs. They wanted to use them. They could use them and make a buck on it, but the minister continued to overrule them. You can't have it both ways.

The question that I have is: has your union done any analysis and work on log exports? How much of that actually can be kept, either under current economic conditions or in the future, looking forward?

The forest industry is always cyclical — as you know, being in there. I've been there. A time will come that those logs are needed here to feed those mills, and they won't be there. Has your organization done any work on that — that what is leaving here is actually to be used for tomorrow?

M. Cameron: We haven't actually gotten into that kind of detailed work, but we do support the CCPA and Ben Parfitt, whom I've relied on with his report. They've done those kinds of detailed analyses.

One thing that I hope doesn't get lost in the union's position on raw log export is reforestation. As I was researching this presentation and talking to our members in the field, this is something I heard over and over again from people who live in the communities you've been visiting — that nothing is happening. Now, whether that's true or not, that's the impression that's left.

Certainly, when you look at the numbers, it would appear to be true. When you look at the numbers from the minister, we've only reforested 50,000 hectares since 2005. So more needs to be done, in our view.

B. Stewart: Thanks, Mark. I appreciate the sensitivity around the log exports. The question I'd like to find out from you is…. I think we know there's a gap between somebody adding value to those products. Would your union be supportive of some sort of way for the govern-
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ment and industry trying to find a value-add opportunity?

I'm not exactly certain what that is, but I think when we talk about coastal logs and getting them to Chilliwack, for instance, etc., there is a disconnect on the freight. But if it was back out on the coast, and those jobs could be created, would you be supportive of something like that, an initiative that looked at…?

I think the obvious idea of a tax is fundamentally flawed from an economic point of view. If there's a way of creating a demand or a desire, finding out what it is that that wood is going to, maybe, in China, and maybe being able to do something, would you…?

We tax a lot of things, so from my point of view, I'm not sure calling it "fundamentally flawed" is correct, but to get back to your central point….

B. Stewart: Well, it's a penalty. We're trying to incent good behaviour — right?

To get back to your point, for years our union has been calling for that kind of forest summit, if you will, to find ways, and we have done some work on converting industry and finding ways to, as you say, reward good behaviour with profit. Whether that's a conversion of the existing facilities…. The one thing that we have to do, and we would support this, is that we think you've got to get more from every tree.

There are fewer trees out there. That's why we're here. Right now we're not getting enough from them.

B. Stewart: No, some of them are on private lands too. That's the other little bit of a problem too.

J. Rustad (Chair): In terms of your comments on log exports, and following up on a question from Harry here, if we are not able to process the logs locally for economic reasons, whether it's being able to ship into the Interior or its facility out in the local area in the northwest, are you suggesting that we should save those logs and not harvest them, not have an export market but hold those in reserve for an economic change when there may be a time when those are economical, even though 60 percent of the jobs associated with the processing of a tree are working in the woods?

M. Cameron: No. What we're suggesting is that you have to find a way to make those logs economical. Whether that's, as your colleague has suggested, finding new ways to deal with that wood or it's converting the existing facilities, we have to find a way to use that wood.

J. Clogg: Good afternoon. My name is Jessica Clogg. I'm the executive director and senior counsel at West Coast Environmental Law.

First, briefly, for those of you…. I don't know all of you. A couple of words about, I guess, my qualifications as a witness, so to speak. I did my graduate work on tenure reform in British Columbia many years ago. I've practised forestry law at West Coast Environmental Law since 1999. I was the editor, for many years, of the West Coast loose-leaf Guide to Forest Land Use Planning.

I was one of the principal technical drafters of the Forest Stewardship Council certification standards for British Columbia; the past chair of the Canadian Eco-Lumber Co-op, a marketing and distribution co-op for eco-certified wood products; and was engaged in several multi-year strategic land use planning processes.

That said, I will direct my comments to the questions in the discussion paper, beginning with the values and principles that we believe should guide the evaluation and decision-making on this matter.

First and foremost, we believe that we need to be focusing on enabling jobs for our children by planning for more diverse community and economic business opportunities from forest lands that can be sustained over the long term. For decades we have known that the long-run harvest level from our forests will be significantly lower than current harvest levels, the so-called falldown effect, yet B.C. has continued to careen towards this point as if the party was never going to end.

It's as if we had a fast-forward button held down by the warmer winters engendered by climate change in rapid harvesting of mountain pine beetle–affected areas. This has brought us to this Lorax type of moment, where we're now turning our sights on the small percentage of remaining lands that have been set aside for old-growth conservation, wildlife habitat and similar values.

The proposal to log in these areas, one of the options under consideration by your committee, is a watershed moment for British Columbia. If we do not pause now to re-examine the course we are on, the options for our future and those of our children will be irreparably harmed. A recent report from the Pacific Coast Collaborative, whose members actually include the province of British Columbia, brings this point neatly to a head.

That report suggests that not resource extraction but what they call the clean economy in our region is expected to be "the single most important global opportunity on the medium-term horizon, with revenues expected to reach $2.3 trillion by 2020." Environmental protection and resource management is explicitly flagged as one of
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the three key sectors of this so-called clean economy that stand out for their job-growth potential. The report finds that emerging opportunities for employment gains in this sector will be directly linked to conservation, ecosystem restoration and climate adaptation initiatives.

Secondly, in terms of principles to take into account, clearly we must be recognizing and respecting aboriginal title and rights. There are powerful court decisions that make it clear that First Nations constitutionally protected title and rights must be dealt with honourably. This is in terms of the process and the actual allocation of the resource and in all tenure and land use decisions.

We believe that honourably addressing title and rights should also include, in the words of the Clayoquot Sound scientific panel, "co-management based on equal partnership and mutual respect as a means of including indigenous people and their knowledge in planning and managing their traditional territories."

Thirdly, we believe that we need to identify and implement new mechanisms for local self-determination and community benefit and to distribute benefits fairly. Over the years the benefits of logging and forestry on public lands have been slipping away from local communities, and many First Nations have benefited very little.

There have been calls over the years for vastly expanding area-based tenures held by First Nations and communities and for new models of regional and local decision-making, as well as the creation of open, transparent regional log markets located as closely as possible to where timber is harvested to diversify access to the resource, including for value-added manufacturers.

With respect to some of the potential actions being considered, we stress that any tenure shifts must not further entrench existing corporate tenure rights. For example, we've seen, historically, proposals to roll over volume-based tenures into area-based tenures, a proposal rarely met with much enthusiasm by British Columbians.

The high level of corporate control in our forests is one of the root causes of our current dilemma, and any shifts towards area-based tenures must focus first and foremost on First Nations and community tenures.

We must also respect ecological limits and apply the precautionary principle. Economies are part of human cultures, and human cultures are part of the ecosystems. We ignore the ecological limits of our environment at our peril.

Healthy human societies and economies rely on the ecosystems that provide ecological services and resources, whether that's clean drinking water or the future supply of resources for future generations. We are already reaching a point in many areas of the province, including those impacted by mountain pine beetle, where the cumulative effect of human activities is threatening the supply of vital goods like clean water and environmental services like air and water purification, carbon storage and sequestration, waste treatment, and so on.

We would thus recommend great caution with respect to a number of the area actions under consideration — not only logging in reserved areas but also things like broadcast fertilization or increasing the harvest of economically marginal timber where, for example, it may be uneconomical because of constraints like steep slopes prone to landslides — due to the potential of unintended impacts on ecological systems and human communities.

We must manage for resilient forests and resilient communities. As I'm sure you've heard from many, the ability of an ecosystem to cope with disturbance and stress and rebuild itself, this principle of resilience, is central.

In the face of the unprecedented impact of the current mountain pine beetle infestation and the now inevitable impacts of some degree of climate change, we need to ensure that the decisions that we do control are taken with a view to increasing the likelihood that our ecosystems can heal themselves in the face of human and natural disturbances. This will almost certainly mean retaining the limited areas that have been set aside for biodiversity and other ecological values and maintaining or improving connectivity between them.

Finally, we must ensure that decisions are informed by best available science and indigenous knowledge.

Now, a word of context is in order with respect to the proposal to log in areas currently constrained by timber harvest. As you know, these areas were the result of 20 years of collaborative, strategic land use planning in B.C. B.C. is one of the only jurisdictions in the world that has applied this type of planning to balance various interests. Other areas were established as part of the province's biodiversity strategy.

However, before we move forward to consider eliminating these areas to meet timber shortfalls, we must emphasize that there are already serious questions regarding whether the areas reserved for these purposes would currently be sufficient to meet the objectives and principles I have identified. There are a number of reasons for this. I won't go through all of those that are listed in the written submissions.

Top of the list. Climate considerations were virtually absent from the deliberations. The scientific credibility of the outcomes was limited by politically established caps on protected areas, the timber supply impact caps on implementing our biodiversity strategy. Tenure reform wasn't on the table, and in most cases there was an absence of government-to-government engagement with First Nations.

Indeed, as the chief forester recognized in recommending a conservation uplift in mountain pine beetle–affected areas as long ago as 2005, it is very likely that more, not less, retention is required, above and beyond areas already managed for non-timber values, to meet ecological and social objectives.

Secondly, you've asked: how should decisions be made
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regarding potential actions to mitigate timber supply? Clearly, the principles I've just articulated should be given effect, particularly the establishment of new mechanisms for local and regional decision-making. Of course, regional, provincial, national and international non-governmental organizations with expertise on environmental stewardship and scientific research will also bring in a valuable source of information and expertise.

Similar to the recommendation of the Forest Practices Board in its 2009 report on biodiversity conservation during the salvage logging in the central interior of B.C., we recommend that landscape-level planning and, if necessary, planning at other scales be carried out to identify ecosystem elements and processes that must be retained in mountain pine beetle–affected areas to meet the principles I have identified.

This planning and management must be collaborative. We need to articulate clearly collaborative decision-making procedures and respect diverse values and traditions.

I want to particularly emphasize that a key input to decision-making about any potential actions to mitigate timber supply impacts needs to be based on broad-scale, proactive assessments of cumulative effects on key environmental and cultural values, including the current condition of these values as compared to scientifically based benchmarks and low-risk thresholds.

I want to move now to the question regarding cautions and advice. I've quoted in the submissions there from an open letter that a number of organizations along with ours sent to Ministers Thomson and Bell. I won't reiterate those, but certainly stressing the negative impacts on existing businesses that rely on visual and recreational values and the fact that this proposal could leave communities with even less resources within which to diversify their economy after the timber supply from reserves has been exhausted.

We also emphasized in that submission the fact that some of the actions proposed would set an alarming precedent with respect to other provincial commitments to lasting legal protection following land use processes.

The current mountain pine beetle crisis challenges each of us to pause and consider the vision that we hold of the kind of future we want for B.C.'s forests. The vision of our forests that is implicit and sometimes explicit in our current forestry laws is an economy that maximizes the production of timber and sees environmental regulation as principally red tape that constrains the right of tenure holders.

That fundamental timber production focus has never shifted, not with the introduction of forest practices legislation or the biodiversity strategy, which we continue to see in the continued dominance of clearcut logging and the elevated cut levels over the past few years. Forest laws that have been principally oriented towards timber extraction have come at a cost to our life support systems, a cost which is becoming increasingly acute as a result of climate change.

As we stand at this crossroads, we should not need the Lorax to tell us that clearcutting the last remnants of forest and reserves only takes us further down a path of no return. Instead, it's time to face the hard questions and take the future in our hands as British Columbians.

There are no shortages of smart, well-researched and well-supported proposals for reform from blue-ribbon panels and commissions. I don't know how many of them have recommended a significant takeback of tenure and redistribution, etc., or log markets, value-added that not just the panels and commission reports but citizens initiatives like the current Healthy Forests, Healthy Communities initiatives and the forest solutions for sustainable communities act proposed over a decade ago.

There are consistent themes in these proposals, many of which I've touched on as I spoke about the principles. Furthermore, as we consider tenure reform in light of today's ecological and economic context, it's time to begin thinking more holistically about the resources and services provided by our forests. We need to ensure that our laws regarding tenure and carbon ownership keep pace with new economic opportunities — for example, from carbon markets — and give due priority to key ecological services provided by nature, particularly in light of climate change.

B.C. has a forest law system that is stuck in the last century, and it's time for change. The economic model it was designed to serve is no longer serving B.C. communities. The challenges facing communities in mountain pine beetle–affected areas and by our forest sector are substantial. But keeping our heads in the sand for another few years will not produce solutions. It's time to move forward with designing solutions and reforming our forestry laws for the 21st century if we hope to take advantage of some of those opportunities identified in the Pacific Coast Collaborative report.

E. Foster: I don't know where to start. As I look up and down the table here, several of us have fed our families over the last years — me the longest, because I'm the oldest — from the forest industry.

We talk about industrial forestry. As I look at the other end of the table, I see two fellows that worked in the milling business. I was in the forest industry. We worked for major licensees. Bill worked for the union, but that's where the living came from.

When we talk about major tenure reform — and I'll go to Burns Lake, for example — in order for anybody that's in the forest industry to get investments, in order to go
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to the bank or their lenders to get money, they have to have tenure. If there is no surety of tenure, there's no investment. That's a fact of the business, of doing business in the forest industry.

Now, I've been logging since I was 18 years old. The practices that we had when I was 18 years old were disgusting. It's what we did. I've watched them change, and I've certainly watched them change over the last 15 or 20 years of the 30 years, maybe even longer, that I've been in British Columbia. We have much better practices, as we should have had. There's no question about that. Continue to improve what we do on the land base? Absolutely.

But we're not going to go back to 50 years ago when there were hundreds of little mills all over the place. That tenure was sold to the major licensees. I asked this question of Pamela when she presented earlier. How do we go to the people in Burns Lake and say: "I'm sorry, but we've decided because of…. We're not going to be able to help you rebuild your mill"?

J. Clogg: There are a number of points embedded within that, but starting with your last point, I think that the point is that no one should be telling the people of Burns Lake what should be done. The point here is in terms of creating new mechanisms for local communities to have greater control over what goes on in their backyards. I haven't necessarily presupposed a solution, but I have suggested along the vein of the Forest Practices Board report that there should be cumulative effects assessments done, there should be planning done, and there should be an opportunity for communities to be envisioning the long-term future they want to have for those areas.

With respect to access to timber supply, the analogy I sometimes use is that to be a baker you don't need to own a flour mill. We still do not have functioning log markets in British Columbia where someone who wants to produce a product can drive a truck up and buy logs. I think that once we start looking deeper and questioning some of our assumptions, questioning the assumptions upon which our current system is built, we start to see opportunities — places for greater opportunity.

I think what we need to do is take a step back from thinking about our timber tenure system and our laws around timber extraction, to be thinking about the full range of values offered by forests. I've been deeply engaged in the dialogue around forests and carbon. Again, not a panacea, but there are new economic opportunities associated with forest carbon markets, particularly in a region where we have tremendous restoration needs.

We need to be thinking about the way we structure rights and responsibilities and the access to the forest and who's controlling it with that broader range of services and resources in mind. It's a question of when, not if, we have to have this conversation. We can continue going down the same path for a few more years, and we'll simply end up in a place where we have fewer options for communities to try and chart a future for their children.

H. Bains: Thank you, Jessica. A couple of questions. I'm going to go over your statement you made. One is that the high level of corporate control in our forests is one of the root causes of the current dilemma. I'll read you both of the statements, and then maybe you could answer both of those questions.

My question on this one would be this. Can you elaborate a bit more on how you could make that statement: it is because of the high density of corporation control?

The second one is that on page 4 you say: "For decades we have known that in the long run harvests from British Columbia's forests will need to be significantly lower than current harvest rates." Now, is that statement because of the mountain pine beetle issue, or is that a general statement? If it is a general statement, then I believe you know that in the 1990s we went through the system and the land use, and decisions were made.

In my understanding, they were made based on the sustainability of our forests on a long-term basis. How are you going to have these two statements? The first one, just elaborate how that is. How is the second statement made, that you say for decades we've known that the harvest levels need to be lowered, when we actually had made those decisions in the 1990s?

J. Clogg: I think that you'll find an analysis of that in any of the chief forester's timber supply review reports. As we deplete the remaining old-growth forest that's available on the timber-harvesting land base, the amount of harvest that can be sustained from our second-growth forests is lower. I think that notion of the falldown effect has always been implicit in the way the allowable annual cut has been established.

If you look at the economic objectives of the Crown — which, again, are publicly available — I think there has been direction to move gradually towards that point. But I think that's a fairly established principle. That's the way it goes. Old-growth forests have greater volume, and that's the nature of the beast.

What I was trying to get at was that the mountain pine beetle epidemic and the elevated harvest levels have essentially hit a fast-forward button and taken us to a place we would have eventually gotten to anyway, in terms of constrained timber supply.

In terms of the sustainability or lack thereof of the outcomes from land use planning processes, I did touch on that briefly. Going into the early '90s and those land use planning processes, we were working with sort of a three-legged stool model of sustainability — this notion that outcomes where you had sort of politically competing ecological, social and economic values would result
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in sustainable outcomes.

Our understanding of the science and of conservation biology has evolved since then, and I think we have a much greater of ecological limits and of the idea that if we want to maintain the species that are adapted to the historic forest dynamics of an area, we have to leave a certain amount behind on the landscape in order to maintain those structures and that functioning of the forest. When you had a cap placed on protected areas, you had a timber supply impact caps on the biodiversity strategy….

Let me come at it another way. There was a recent op-ed in a major scientific journal that looked at a range of different land use plans, conservation design that had been done, that sort of said: "How much do you need to leave behind to look after ecosystems?" It was between 30 and 70 percent. If you compare that to these little remnant areas that we're talking about in these regions, you get a sense of the disconnect.

Your first question was with respect to the role of the tenure system in kind of getting us to where we are now. If you go back to the royal commissions in the '40s, and you look at the very explicit objectives for which our tenure system was designed, there was a desire to increase investment by large, integrated companies, for which they were given access to the resource for little or no cost. They had to maintain processing facilities, as you know.

Part of that was to bring that under sustained-yield management, which was ultimately designed to convert our old-growth forest into managed timber farms, I guess — to use, probably, the language of the day. That system was designed to privilege the interests of large institutional actors based on a series of assumptions that made sense at the time — that that was how we were going to sustain employment, how we were going to sustain communities.

If we look at the actual impact…. You look at the mills that have shut down, etc. It's no criticism of the companies. They're there to make money. They're not there to necessarily provide jobs. They don't have a necessary commitment to stewardship just because they're large and have control over the land base.

The policy objectives that the tenure system was designed to achieve simply look out of date now. They haven't been proven out by experience.

J. Rustad (Chair): Thank you very much. There are two other people that have questions, but unfortunately, we're out of time. Thank you very much for your presentation.

H. Harshaw: Thank you very much for the opportunity to address the Special Committee on Timber Supply. In addition to serving as the chair of the Outdoor Recreation Council of British Columbia, I am also a research associate in the faculty of forestry at UBC and have investigated social aspects of forestry and resource management for more than ten years.

I would like to present three recommendations to the Special Committee on Timber Supply as you deliberate on how to best address the issue of a decreased mid-term timber supply as a result of loss of timber supply in the central Interior. These recommendations are largely procedural.

However, before I do, I would like to provide you with some context about outdoor recreation in British Columbia. The Outdoor Recreation Council's mission is to conserve and enhance outdoor settings and resources in British Columbia and secure public access to them for recreation.

Our objectives are to promote the benefits of public outdoor recreation in B.C.; to represent the interests of outdoor recreation communities to government, the industry and to the public; to advocate and facilitate access to public lands and waters for outdoor recreation; to foster responsible use of British Columbia's outdoors by recreational users through advocacy and education; to be a forum for the exchange of views between government, outdoor recreation groups and other organizations in matters related to outdoor recreation; and to build bridges between outdoor recreation groups with conflicting interests.

Founded in 1976, the Outdoor Recreation Council of B.C. works on behalf of about 40 provincial member groups representing more than 100,000 individuals as well as the general public to protect the outdoor recreation way of life in B.C.

The Outdoor Recreation Council is the only organization that represents the interests of the full range of public outdoor recreation users of B.C.'s lands and waters. Our vision is for British Columbia to be a world leader in the conservation and enjoyment of outdoor places. Our vision is for all British Columbians to have access to diverse and abundant opportunities to enjoy outdoor recreation experiences.

I now turn to the relevance of outdoor recreation to British Columbia and communities.

Outdoor recreation in British Columbia is ubiquitous. Outdoor recreation is important to more than four out of five British Columbians and plays an important role in connecting people to forests. The Canadian Forest Service estimates that more than half of all recreation user days occur in forested ecosystems outside of parks and protected areas.

Maintaining a diversity of recreation settings, from large wilderness areas to close-to-nature settings with supporting infrastructure, is (1) important to all British Columbians; and (2) good management practice, as this permits landscape managers to respond to changes in re-
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creation demand over time.

British Columbians will continue to pursue outdoor recreation opportunities in the province's forests. It is in the province's interests to coordinate outdoor recreation with other forest uses in order to continue to provide safe experiences and minimize potential recreation impacts on other forest values. Suffice it to say, outdoor recreationists are an important and large constituency in forest management.

I would now like to address the necessity of restarting the recreation resource inventory to facilitate better strategic planning. Two-thirds of British Columbians believe that forest management currently focuses too much attention on timber resources and not enough on non-timber resources. Many of the supporting documents for this committee recognize recreation as an important forest value. However, one document, Land Use Planning and Timber Constraints, estimates that outdoor recreation presents a relatively small constraint to the timber-harvesting land base, roughly 0.18 percent.

We question the magnitude of this calculation and suggest it might be much higher. Likewise, the current conditions identified in the recreation resources values assessment likely underestimate the actual conditions of the province's recreation resources. It's not our intent to impose more constraints on the timber-harvesting land base. Rather, we believe it's important that an accurate representation of the province's outdoor recreation resources be reflected in timber supply review in order to avoid conflicts and confusion in the future.

There's a well-known principle in land use management that you can't manage what you don't measure. There's no question that most approaches to mitigate the mid-term timber supply problem will have an impact on recreation. But determining the extent of these impacts or, indeed, characterizing them will be exceedingly difficult due to the poor state of the province's inventories of outdoor recreation activities, opportunities and infrastructure.

The development and initial data collection for the recreation resource inventory — which includes the visual landscape inventory, the recreation opportunity spectrum and the recreation features inventory in the late 1990s — has been used in the past as input for timber supply review and annual allowable cut determinations.

There are many examples of instances where forestry activities have impacted longstanding, formal established trails that have not yet been gazetted due to the lack of resources. Although these trails should be included in the recreation features inventory, their exclusion from consideration may also be a result of a lack of movement on the B.C. trails strategy.

The Outdoor Recreation Council of British Columbia's first recommendation to the Special Committee on Timber Supply is that as it is widely acknowledged that forest management constitutes more than timber management and that more than four out of five British Columbians participate in some form of outdoor recreation, the government of British Columbia reconstitute the recreation and resource inventory and its constituent parts in order to facilitate land use decision-making that is better informed on non-timber public uses of the province's forest.

I would now like to consider the need to have meaningful consultation with local outdoor recreation clubs and stakeholders where proposed forestry activities may impact outdoor recreation opportunities and infrastructure.

More than 70 percent of British Columbians believe that the citizens of B.C. need to have more opportunities for input into forest management. Meaningful consultation with local recreation clubs and stakeholders is critical, given the potential scale of timber supply mitigative measures.

It can be difficult for some people to keep up with all the strategic initiatives that can impact outdoor recreation. It can also be difficult for laypeople to translate strategic direction into operational reality.

Many of the forest companies in the province have public advisory groups as part of their sustainable forest management certification requirements. These venues have been quite effective at bringing together local stakeholders for discussions about local and regional forest management and planning issues. Outdoor recreation representatives at these tables have generally been able to work with forestry companies to achieve planning outcomes that either did not compromise recreation opportunities or, where they do, find alternative opportunities for outdoor recreation participants to access.

A recent example of this can be found in Revelstoke, where a local logging company worked with the Revelstoke Snowmobile Club to find alternative trail routing when timber harvesting would have disrupted snowmobile trails. A similar formalized approach, undertaken more broadly by government or licensees, could serve to help in the translation and understanding of operational realities and their potential impacts on recreational resources.

The Outdoor Recreation Council of British Columbia's second recommendation to the Special Committee on Timber Supply is to support transparency in the operational and strategic plans by working with local and regional outdoor recreation stakeholders to mitigate potential adverse impacts to recreation resources in a formal and long-term manner before action is taken on the ground.

I now turn to our last issue, the importance of recognizing past land use planning outcomes and past stakeholder consultations. Forest management does not occur in a vacuum. Crown lands support a diversity of values, interests and activities. This diversity was recog-
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nized in various land use planning initiatives, such as the Commission on Resources and Environment and land and resource management planning.

The widespread involvement of the public in land and resource management plans created expectations among the public that the plans would be honoured and that the future land use planning exercises would involve a high degree of public consultation. These planning tables demonstrated that British Columbians place a high degree of importance on the full range of forest values.

Indeed, a survey of nine timber-dependent communities that I conducted for Canadian Forest Products in 2006 revealed that out of the seven forest values presented to them, respondents, over 1,700 of them, consistently ranked non-economic values over economic ones. The top four values were sustaining the productive capacity of forests, sustaining biological richness, sustaining opportunities for a wide range of quality-of-life benefits and managing forests to reduce global warming.

Sustaining economic benefits from forestry and wood products, and sustaining non-timber economic benefits were ranked fifth and sixth.

The terms of reference for these regional planning advisory processes required that LRMP tables prepare long-term plans, sometimes in excess of 50 years, for the management of the lands and waters of most of the province. The plans resulting from the LRMP tables were to endure until they were reviewed and possibly modified at ten-year intervals by recalled stakeholder planning tables.

While finding a fair and reasonable way to end the war in the woods was a factor in initiating land use planning, the overall purpose was to provide reliable long-term plans for the development of the province's resources through a participatory, democratic stakeholder process, using the best scientific, traditional and practical knowledge available.

Speaking on behalf of outdoor recreation stakeholders throughout the province, we believe that it is important that whatever solutions are adopted by the Special Committee on Timber Supply to address the mid-term timber supply deficit resulting from the pine beetle epidemic in the central Interior, they should not be allowed to be used as ready precedents for increasing timber supply in other areas of the province.

Visual standards and preservation. Retention and partial retention VQO areas should not be reduced. Maintaining these is essential for tourism and outdoor recreation which can support the diversification of rural communities and for maintaining British Columbia's successful super, natural tourism brand.

Lastly, parks and protected areas must not be considered as possible areas for providing harvesting opportunities to increase timber supply.

The Outdoor Recreation Council of British Columbia's third and final recommendation to the Special Committee on Timber Supply is that the special committee form a subcommittee of stakeholders to review LRMPs in light of the mountain pine beetle epidemic. This subcommittee would include wilderness tourism; environmental and conservation stakeholders; the Outdoor Recreation Council of British Columbia; as well as forestry, communities and other relevant stakeholders. The LRMPs should be reviewed not just with an eye for short-term solutions but for understanding the long-term effects of these plans or any changes to these plans.

In a sense, all three of our recommendations are connected. Government must have a better grasp of the outdoor recreation resources in the province and must have a better understanding of the needs and requirements of outdoor recreation participants in order to manage our forest resources effectively and sustainably for the full range of forest values identified in FRPA. Recreation resources are a vital component of the quality of life in British Columbia's communities.

Having examined social aspects of forestry and of other resource industries in British Columbia for the past ten years, I appreciate the concerns and issues of rural British Columbians and of residents of timber-dependent communities. However, this appreciation is tempered with an understanding that for many British Columbians, and not just those in the Lower Mainland, quality of life, and this includes ecological issues and values as well as social ones, is as important and sometimes more so than economic opportunity.

I'm going to use the Chair's prerogative here and allow the members that didn't get a chance to ask questions last time to go first, if they'd like.

When you look at the various options that this committee has…. Obviously, you're recommending that we bring back the land use planning tables to look at the problem in light of the pine beetle. What you're suggesting is actually that there would be more areas set aside rather than less. Is that what you're…? Or am I presuming an outcome that may not yet be there?

H. Harshaw: With due respect, I think you may be presuming an outcome. What we are advocating is not necessarily a new round of land use planning but a formal revisitation of the past land use management plans that were done with stakeholder involvement throughout the province.

It seems as though, to a degree, the special committee is in a sense conducting a review of these anyway. We would suggest that making it perhaps more formal and involving stakeholders might be a better way to go about it.
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B. Routley: Okay. I discovered on this journey that I've been on in the last few weeks, along with the rest of the committee, that the old growth in the Interior is different than the old growth on the coast — that they actually have transitional old growth that can move around, apparently.

I'd be interested in your point of view on…. I've heard mayors from communities, etc., say that they would rather see a green, growing forest than grey or dead pine. As part of the land use planning exercise, do you believe that that is something that could be looked at, to look at ensuring that we…?

Well, obviously a lot has changed since the original land use plans, and those areas have changed dramatically. Would you support looking at those kinds of issues as well?

H. Harshaw: Absolutely. I think that these discussions should be held at the community level. We're not here to speak on behalf of British Columbia communities. Rather, we're here to make sure that outdoor recreation is considered in these deliberations.

Outdoor recreation is a very important means of connecting people to forests. In fact, it's likely the primary means of connecting the public to forests and helping them to understand and appreciate forests.

If these interactions or opportunities for interactions are lost, I think it could be quite dangerous. It could result in a loss of the constituency for forests. If people no longer get out to them or they are barred access from some parts of the forest that they have traditionally had access to, we run the risk of forests becoming not relevant to people. I suggest that is a far graver concern than, perhaps, the one we are looking at today.

E. Foster: Thank you, Howard, for your presentation. As a person who had a woodlot, whenever we were changing our development plan or working on our development plan, we certainly advertised publicly.

It's quite often difficult to get people to come out to them, so I've a bit of a challenge to your organization, because it sure makes it a lot easier when people do come out and take part in those. That's the opportunity for any local groups, and that is done locally here. So a bit of a challenge there to you.

Somewhere here in the body of the thing you talked about the collaboration between the ground operations and the local outdoor people, whether it be the hikers or the snowmobile clubs or quadders and so on, which is spot on. I think that that's where that needs to be done.

You mentioned the Revelstoke issue, a perfect example. It's not difficult on the ground to do those things, so I think you're right on, in the right direction there to keep that at a local level.

The LRMP thing…. As Bill alluded to, we've been told by some groups that that's a sacred book that needs to be kept closed. Others would throw it open. It's going to be one of the challenges we have as a committee, whether we do take a look at them. I tend to agree with you that it's a living document that should be reviewed.

I would ask you if you could, to some of the other local areas and so on, get that out to your local organizations for their communities — to say there's going to be any big change or anything. I think that it's something that needs to be looked at in light of the fact that the land base doesn't look anything like it did 15 years ago when these documents were written. I appreciate that, and I thank you for your presentation.

H. Harshaw: Thank you. If I could quickly respond, I agree with those challenges of public involvement that you mentioned. Things like open houses aren't the only ways of going about that. I think, when we're trying to engage the public, it has to be done through multiple venues.

Venues like this, for example, are an excellent one, but I think we need to open that up. Not everyone is comfortable speaking in a formal setting such as this. One tool that could be used is widespread public surveys — not as the sole means of gathering public information but as contributing to bettering our information.

To reiterate that point about Revelstoke, it's not the only one in the province. Certainly, I don't mean to imply that recreation and forestry are at loggerheads. In fact, many of the forest roads provide access for much of the recreation that we pursue in the province.

Getting back to that Revelstoke example, by working with that local logging contractor, the Revelstoke Snowmobile Club was able to preserve opportunities for tourists, largely from Alberta, who come in and spend over $460 a day on their snowmobiling activities in Revelstoke.

N. Macdonald (Deputy Chair): That was a good segue, because I was going to ask about the natural resource road act and resource roads. Some of the solutions that have been put in front of us relate to infrastructure that make stands currently uneconomical possibly economical.

Now, some of that infrastructure wouldn't have anything to do with your organization, such as Hydro and things like that, but roads come up a lot and, of course, how to pay for them, especially in areas where there's minimum stumpage. The idea of sharing that cost with all of the users comes up again and again.

Maybe how you have participated in the process around looking at infrastructure and how to pay for it. What are your thoughts on how that cost could be shared or if it should be shared?
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H. Harshaw: Well, I'll start off by saying that our executive director, Jeremy McCall, is involved in the resource road consultations that are going on currently, so we are involved in that discussion.

I don't think we're averse to the sharing of the cost for those resource roads. In fact, within the past ten years that idea was actually floated, that recreation user groups could take the management control of certain roads and actually, at the time, recreation sites as well.

One of the biggest barriers we had was the issue of liability. That issue was not cleared up, and the issue sort of fell off the table.

I think that if we can sort out this issue of liability and whether that extends to the recreation user groups or other community groups that are perhaps managing these roads or back to the government, I think we could have these discussions again.

N. Macdonald (Deputy Chair): There was some legislative work done on the liability, but I know that there is still work ongoing with the act itself, and in terms of timing, I'm not sure. But that's good to hear. Obviously, there are multiple users, and we have depended upon a road system that was put in place at a time previous to these times. It seems there are answers still to be found.

H. Harshaw: Absolutely. Again, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, I think that many of these decisions about which roads are open to the public and which roads are closed, which roads are managed by certain groups, certainly involve a high degree of local consultation.

D. Barnett: Thank you for your presentation. As someone who has been involved with this probably a lot longer than you, because I'm a lot older, in trail-building…. My husband built the Cariboo Gold Rush Trail in the Cariboo-Chilcotin.

I have a question or two about local participation. When I read the statement here, it says that two-thirds of British Columbians believe that forest management currently focuses too much attention on timber resources and not enough on non-timber resources. How was this information gathered? Was it gathered provincially? Was it gathered in rural British Columbia? Where did it get gathered?

H. Harshaw: That statistic is from our most recent survey that we've done in the faculty of forestry for Genome B.C. in 2011. It was a representative provincial sample. Throughout the province it was geographically representative as well as otherwise. It's not just that study. We found similar things in a study we did for the Oil and Gas Commission also last year and in a study we did for Canadian Forest Products in 2006 of nine timber-dependent communities, largely in the Interior and the north. We found very similar levels of opinion on that.

D. Barnett: So it was basically in rural British Columbia that these statistics were gathered.

H. Harshaw: Provincially, but there is certainly regional support for that as well.

The other question I have is No. 3, to the Special Committee on Timber Supply forming stakeholders to review the LRMPs in light of the mountain pine beetle epidemic. I see that your first consideration is wilderness tourism, environmental conservation stakeholders and the Outdoor Rec Council of B.C. as well as forestry communities.

Do you not believe that the communities affected should be No. 1 in these issues?

O. Quinn: Thank you for this invitation. As mentioned, I represent the Forest Stewardship Council of Canada. My name is Orrin Quinn. My colleague here is Satnam Manhas. The options we feel that are being considered to address mid-term timber supply shortages are not generally consistent with the vision that we have for B.C. forests under the Forest Stewardship Council. Instead, we want to provide a potentially alternative set of options.

Today I'm going to start with a brief overview of the FSC, a summary of why proposed options may prevent certification in those areas being considered. I want to acknowledge specific barriers to certification for these areas and discuss what other options may exist.

I'm a professional forester, and I manage the FSC program in Ecotrust Canada here in Vancouver, and I represent approximately 50 value-added processors in B.C. I'm also the treasurer for FSC Canada.

John Cathro sends regrets. He was supposed to be here. He is also a board member of FSC Canada, an independent auditor and consultant, and a professional forester. As well, with me today I have Satnam Manhas. Satnam is the program manager for Ecotrust Canada and also a professional forester. He has been the general manager for
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the last three years in the Clayoquot Sound forest communities program, which is part of 15 Canadian model forest sites in Canada.

To start, I'm sure everyone here knows about FSC, but I'll give a quick overview. It's a voluntary certification process that promotes responsible forest management worldwide. We promote environmentally appropriate, socially beneficial and economically viable management of the world's forests. We're widely seen as the most credible certification system and the only system in Canada to have broad support from First Nations and conservation organizations.

This means that forests evaluated under FSC meet strict economic, environmental and social standards. Fibre sourced from these forests is then tracked from the forest all the way to the consumer under the chain-of-custody program. Wood, paper and other products are then sold with the logo into the marketplace.

Globally we have over 155 million hectares of certified forests in the world, making FSC the largest voluntary certification system in the world. In Canada we have over 48 million hectares of certified forests, including five of the world's ten largest certified forests. This means that nearly one-third of all FSC-certified forests are within Canada.

The options being considered, we feel, may prevent FSC certification. We're not here to prejudge the outcome of this process. However, there are some options and potential outcomes here that, in our opinion, will make FSC certification in the affected TSAs significantly more difficult to achieve, moving forward.

These options are considering perpetuating the AAC in the short term. That, we know, is unsustainable. These options would do this by reversing decisions made through comprehensive land use planning processes and compromising the protection of old-growth reserves, wildlife habitats, protected areas and other environmental measures.

If these options were implemented, it could be very difficult for FSC certification bodies to certify a company operating in one of these TSAs. If these options were implemented, then a company would have to manage Crown lands significantly differently under FSC standards. Existing certificates in these areas may be strongly impeded by the inclusion of opening up new areas within TSAs. I'll get into that in a minute.

Limiting opportunities by creating barriers to certification. This analysis here was written by John Cathro. He did a short comparison around FSC requirements and identified any of the principles and criteria he thought would be the most difficult to meet if you were to attempt to certify the areas that are being proposed.

The first one is principle 2, on consultation. The network of landscape-level protection was developed, in part, through a comprehensive land use planning process to balance the chambers — social, economic and environmental. The proposed rebalancing of these values would require, we feel, considerably more consultation with directly affected people. As a result, many of the social indicators would be very challenging to meet.

With respect to principle 3, aboriginal rights and title, FSC places a very high priority on aboriginal rights and title. Pursuing these options under consideration without free and informed consent from the local Nations would also present a barrier to certification.

Thirdly, the rate of cut, under principle 5, has to be deemed sustainable. Again, we have issues with meeting certification under FSC requirements — not under Crown requirements but strictly under FSC.

Principle 6 talks about ecological values. Ecologically, the impact of these options could be severe, especially when looking at the provincially and federally listed red and blue species. There's a list of species that I have in the document. We feel that these options could potentially further imperil these species by further fragmenting or impacting their habitat.

In addition, biodiversity values require a representation of ecosystems and certified lands right now that have a certain level of ecosystem representation. They rely strongly on areas that have been set aside due to land use planning and parks and OGMAs and all that stuff. Their calculations on meeting the ecological requirements are based on the areas that are already set aside. We do have a strong potential impact on existing certificates and ones that could potentially be certified.

Principle 9 is based on high-conservation-value forests. Again, that deals with species at risk and many other values. We feel that the proposed options would likely limit the potential for protecting high-conservation values. Generally speaking, we find that the areas being considered would have a very challenging time meeting certification, and the areas that are already under certification may be affected.

Alternative options. One big issue we've raised…. There was a letter sent to BCTS last year from all the CEOs of the major pulp companies in British Columbia, asking for BCTS lands to become FSC-certified to assist with their market increase and market expansion opportunities. BCTS has certified a couple of their lands in group certificates in Haida Gwaii and the midcoast, but unfortunately, they have not moved forward on certification of their entire land base or certain larger areas in the interior of B.C.

In other words, by raising the bar and getting BCTS lands certified, we could help Interior pulp companies maintain an increased market access and potentially receive premiums for products in high demand. We're specifically focused on pulp companies here because that's been a proven market for FSC, as opposed to solid wood products, for which there is a small market but not enough to increase the demand significantly enough to
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offset the losses of moving into other areas.

Secondly, Canfor Pulp has identified stands all around the Prince George region that are less than 60 years of age and that are being underutilized or not utilized. These stands are across many different types of tenures, including some in their own tenure but also across community forests — area-based tenures and volume-based tenures. They have a strong demand for FSC products and, along with other companies, are facing the loss of market share without getting FSC fibre into their pulp mills. We've been working with them to look at accessing some of these areas and supporting certification on these areas.

A lot of them are small-scale, non-replaceable forest licences being utilized by bioenergy companies. Others are areas that are not being utilized. We think that these areas should be considered. To consider them for certification, it requires a joint application by the Crown, because they are non-replaceable forest licences, most of them.

Support for certification on these types of stands. We think that we'll create market advantage, improve utilization and create opportunity for restoration. Right now many of these stands are falling over and being left, and from my understanding, they're not being factored into the mid-term timber supply. Through a restoration, we feel that it's going to have a strong impact on improving the long-term timber supply.

Thirdly, we represent approximately 200 certificates in B.C., all of which have identified demand for certification and have a lack of fibre. A lot of these are the smaller niche markets for value-added products and do have impacts locally in the community — not as strong as the major players, but they do have a strong impact in the community. Increasing the supply of products into these operations, we feel, will also increase market access and the viability of these companies.

In conclusion, from an FSC perspective, we're growing. We are the leading global certification system. The proposed timber supply options could create barriers to certification. Government support for certification could increase solutions that do not involve potentially reducing the ecological, economic and social values.

I'll maybe give Satnam an opportunity to speak, too, from a forest communities perspective.

S. Manhas: I've been working for the last three years as general manager of the Clayoquot forest communities program. It's one of 14 or 15 model forest sites across Canada. I think there are 60 around the world currently.

Even though we're outside of your region, I think we have a lot of learnings from the Clayoquot region for you, as we went through, 15 years ago, a significant reduction in our timber supply. That's with the scientific panel review. We just did a 15-year review of that scientific panel.

Andy MacKinnon had said to me before we'd decided to do this: "This is the first time in our history in British Columbia that we've actually done a land use planning exercise and reviewed it." Taking something that we tried and going: "Let's review it and see what happened."

One of the things that we really learned over those 15 years. Wow, we've reduced our timber supply from over a million cubic metres a year to less than 200,000 over that time period. The other thing is that the things that we were thinking about — the scientific panel review at the time, the scientists, what they were tasked to do…. There were a whole bunch of things that we never thought about for the future.

Nobody thought at that time about human well-being factors when they were making those decisions. Those scientists weren't tasked to do that. They were never thinking about people living on the ground, living in those communities right there. How would that impact them?

We were not thinking about cumulative impacts, about other resources, like the gentleman before us said, about resource sector, about things like carbon that are coming up in the world, where we're looking at some of our alternative management scenarios in Clayoquot. We're getting a very good look at carbon opportunities, recreation and forestry and into value-added, if we start thinking about it in a different way.

I would say that doing that review within these communities is a very good idea. People in place is a good start. My family…. I grew up in Terrace, living with my father. He worked in a sawmill for 40 years, and when that sawmill closed down, he left that community. That's the sad part of this.

But people in place, what I saw in Clayoquot where there are a lot of people invested…. They weren't leaving that community, regardless of if they lost their job. They were going to figure it out and make it work. They transitioned in a very different way. I don't know if this is transition you could use as a model for sure. I don't think you could. But they figured it out in the tourism sector.

However, even now we're finding that's over…. I guess there's a huge glut of tourism issues, so looking at it in a resilience perspective, of how diverse we are versus how efficient we are…. We're scared about that right now.

B. Stewart: Thanks very much. I appreciate the insight into the certification system.

One of the things that…. There's some language you've used about precautionary or cautions. I'm wondering about some of the areas that have been set aside in the province — OGMAs and visual-quality corridors and things like that. We've heard also about selective harvesting in some of those areas. The difference between
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old growth in the Interior versus where Clayoquot is, is quite different.

I guess I'm wondering about if there is a way to do the selective logging in those places that's not going to compromise the certification process.

O. Quinn: The FSC views disturbance patterns. They prefer you to harvest on a level that is consistent with natural disturbance patterns.

If you have an area of a past epidemic of mountain pine beetle or large-scale fire disturbance ecology, if you can mitigate that disturbance on a large scale, then you're mitigating the natural disturbance ecology. FSC asks for you to look at the natural range of variability in that forest.

If you look out at the coastal forest, you would have small-gap dynamics, you would have small-gap openings in the forest, whereas in the Interior you would have, in some areas, large-scale fire and mountain pine beetle types of epidemics. If you can mimic the natural disturbance ecology in those regions, it's acceptable under FSC.

There are some baseline requirements for ecological representation, but most of it falls back to what is called the range of natural variability. You have to show that your openings or your harvesting or your management practices are consistent with the range of natural variability. Tembec did in the southern Interior through all their stands. They've shown that.

In some cases it would require a change of harvesting. In areas where there is mountain pine beetle, there are opportunities to maintain certain levels of management styles, but you would have to have a reduction in harvest. On average, the numbers vary, but 5 percent to 15 percent is common. I think Tembec was around about 8 percent reduction in AAC due to FSC certification.

Smaller-scale tenures, woodlots, community forests are more around no reduction in harvest levels due to FSC.

B. Stewart: Why would that be? Like Tembec having to take that reduction, and why would they be exempt?

O. Quinn: They're not necessarily exempt. It's that they manage to a different level. They're managing under a different model than most large-scale companies. Hence, they happen to be more suitable to FSC. Not to say that it's unattainable on a large scale. It isn't.

B. Routley: I'd be interested in what firms are certified to FSC within the pine beetle region. I don't know if you have such a list and if that can be made available.

B. Routley: The other question is about why FSC is that it's a growing certification system globally. As I understand it, it's tougher to get, and that's why not as many companies are FSC-certified in the province. Could you explain what it is that makes your system tougher than the other certifying systems?

O. Quinn: Well, it's tougher…. You could even compare FSC on a scale across Canada. Some people say FSC is more challenging in B.C. rather than the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence and the boreal. It has to do with the structure of how FSC is created. It's created on four pillars in Canada. Those members of each pillar — First Nations, economic, social or environmental — get together. The principles and the criteria are set at an international level, and then the members of FSC locally define the indicators.

Back when FSC was created in B.C., there was a strong membership of environmental organizations, perhaps an imbalance between the four chambers. Right now we're in the process of revising it. The principles and criteria have been revised internationally, so all of the global bodies across the world are now getting together and rewriting the indicators, how you measure for these principles and criteria.

The system is changing, and we're hoping to remove redundancies and make it more efficient. That's one of the reasons why in B.C. we see more of a challenge. The other standards, the boreal and Great Lakes–St. Lawrence standards, were created relatively recently — and in the United States, as well — compared to the B.C. standard.

From a global perspective the difference between FSC and other certification standards is that there are lots of documents around how FSC protects more for ecological value and how FSC includes more community members in the decision around certification, respecting their values and having their voices heard.

I'd be happy to provide that information to you. It gets very detailed. I could go on to it, but I think probably for…. I don't want to lose the audience. There are four or five main criteria that First Nations…. The stuff I covered in this presentation — you could almost take those main areas, those principles, and deem those the ones that are creating the greatest challenge to certification in B.C.

It's not unattainable. We have a lot of woodlots that are pursuing FSC certification, and we have Tembec's lands as well. We have all of Haida Gwaii, essentially, and the midcoast of the province certified.

E. Foster: Two quick questions, and thanks for this. As Ben said, it gives quite a bit of insight into how this works.

Under the part of the presentation that said "Options Being Considered May Prevent FSC Certification," the second paragraph: "These options would do this by reversing decisions made through comprehensive land use planning." I got a bit of a different read on what the two gentlemen said. The question on that is: are you saying
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that we don't revisit those land use plans, or are you saying that we can revisit them, but we don't throw them out? That would be one question.

The second one, under your principles, "Principle 3 and Aboriginal Rights and Titles…. Pursuing the options under consideration without the free and informed consent of local First Nations." Are you suggesting that we go from a consultation to a consent model in our negotiations with First Nations?

O. Quinn: If you want to pursue certification in those areas, then it would have to start with a consultation model, and then it would have to end up with the First Nation being comfortable with what's being proposed. So maybe not necessarily a consent model, but in actual fact, it does become a consent model because the First Nations have to be comfortable with the management practices on the land base.

I'd be interested in hearing what you think the difference is between consent and consultation.

E. Foster: You can read it in the dictionary. It pretty much comes up with…. Consultation is the discussion, and consent is permission. There's a huge difference between the two. We operate in this province on a consultation model and make every effort to come to a mutual agreement on how it goes.

O. Quinn: Coming to a mutual agreement through consultation is what FSC is driven towards. I don't want to get lost in that "consent" term, but principle 3 does require a level of comfort with local Nations, if I can keep it as simple as that, around management practices.

D. Barnett: Well, the question I have is…. We're talking about two different areas of the province of British Columbia. Could you tell me what the population in the Clayoquot is now compared to what it was years ago, before you went into this process, and how large of a geographic area it is so that I could compare?

We're talking about changing lifestyles. We're talking about changing plans. We're talking about changing things. I come from the Cariboo-Chilcotin, which is dependent on forest communities. It's very dependent on our logging industry.

I'd like to know what your population went from and what your geographic area is in the Clayoquot.

S. Manhas: I don't have those statistics with me right offhand. The people there right now…. There are roughly about 5,000 people who live in Clayoquot Sound. Clayoquot Sound's a watershed. That's how small we're going at.

Ecotrust is a non-profit. We believe in working at watershed levels. That's how you make decisions for people in place. The area is probably about 100 square kilometres at the watershed level. Obviously, your Chilcotin area is about, I don't know, eight times larger, if I'm correct. But you also have a dispersed population throughout that area, as we have a dispersed population throughout Clayoquot Sound.

D. Barnett: Maybe I could ask you if you could send me some of those statistics so that I could see what was and what is now, and what you've diversified to.

S. Manhas: The one thing we did five years ago, and I'll quickly say this, is that we had a visioning exercise with all of the forest communities — the companies, the five First Nations that live out there, and a couple of other key players — on what they wanted in their forest communities and how they wanted to transition. They made that decision themselves.

They came out of it, and we said: "What is your biggest asset?" They said: "Our forests are our biggest asset, but we keep seeing them get shipped out in logs somewhere else and everybody else making money off us. We don't do anything with them." Then we asked them, "What are your biggest issues, biggest needs?" and they said: "Housing." We were in a little bit of shock, but housing was their biggest issue.

They needed 350 homes over the next ten years to catch up for the First Nations communities, and the non–First Nations communities needed about 100 homes for low income. They needed skills, training — employment issues. We said: "Wow. There's the kick-start right there."

How do you develop a circle of wealth with forests? Start developing housing, start meeting health and wellness needs, start education and skills, the jobs that you start, building your own homes, and start developing community development over that time.

M. Clark: Good afternoon. I guess I'll introduce my-
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self and dive right into this. Everyone has a copy of the written document?

My name is Mark Clark. I'm the unpaid volunteer chair of the Federation of B.C. Woodlot Associations. Accompanying me is Mr. McNaughton, who is our general manager and pretty much lives in the woodlot world with us. On behalf of the federation and its 23 woodlot associations, basically organized across the province, we represent 875 woodlot licensees and many private forest land owners. We'd like to thank you, first of all, for the opportunity to make this presentation to the special committee on mid-term timber supply.

We'll start by providing a little bit of context around the world of woodlots and some recommendations regarding the mitigation of mid-term timber supply issues with respect to timber supply areas, woodlot licences and private land. We're going to kind of step a little bit out of just our tenure, I guess. I think it's fair to say that mid-term timber supply is pretty much a provincial issue, so we're going to look at the little bit bigger picture here.

For context, woodlot licences are not part of the timber supply area. We kind of wanted to make that point up front. They are stand-alone, small areas, 600 to 1,200 hectares. They have their own AAC. We have our own inventory on each individual woodlot. We measure the trees, and we calculate our annual allowable cut from that.

Woodlots are often located in close proximity to communities, transportation networks and mills. Most include fertile, high-site lands with the potential to grow more timber. Traditionally, woodlots are close to where people live, so we're kind of in between the large industrial operators and the private communities. In almost every community you'll find a woodlot or two in the landscape.

Private land is not part of the timber supply area. We wanted to make that point, as well, as context. We have approximately 91,000 hectares of private land that is attached to our woodlots. Woodlot licensees own substantially more private land than that which typically isn't included in their woodlot licence.

The mid-term timber supply issue on timber supply areas — we have three bullets in the middle of this first page.

First of all, the federation supports the periodic review of higher-level plan objectives and the constraints they impose on the timber-harvesting land base, provided that the review is warranted by a catastrophic event — mountain pine beetle, wildfires — change in societal priorities, new scientific knowledge becoming available or other substantive reason. We feel that the reviews should be done in an open and transparent manner and also that it's critical there is acceptance that the outcome of such reviews could result in more and not necessarily less constraints. In other words, it has to be kind of an open, could-go-either-way analysis.

The federation does not support opening up the entire land use planning system but feels it would be more productive to review an individual objective or group of objectives, such as ungulate winter range, VQOs, riparians, OGMAs, as suits the particular locale.

The federation feels that more area-based tenures can play an important role in mitigating mid-term timber supply issues. If managed and administered properly, small area-based tenures can provide higher yields, better management and sustainability on smaller land units. In addition, they afford the tenure holder with the opportunity to be the ones to harvest the timber and receive the benefits from improved management and incremental silviculture practices.

In other words, the tenure is already in place for us to receive some benefit from increased investment. The members of the federation have considerable experience with managing area-based tenures and would welcome the opportunity to work with the subcommittee to build a tenure model that incents investment and better management.

The third point is that we feel that there should be significantly more woodlot licences, specifically in B.C., as one example of the small tenures. In addition to achieving the benefits mentioned in the previous bullet, when properly located on the landscape, woodlots can make more volume available. Woodlots often provide access to timber from areas that might otherwise have been heavily constrained or designated as "no harvesting."

Woodlots typically operate in small harvest areas. That's one of the reasons why some of our members choose to be FSC-certified. You deal with a five-hectare or a ten-hectare cutblock as opposed to the majors that deal with a 100-hectare or 200-hectare cutblock. If that little patch of timber is right beside your back fence and you're living in the community, it's a lot more palatable to deal with a person that lives in the community that cuts a little bit of timber rather than the big industrial models.

Woodlots have a strong track record for alleviating societal and other concerns on the land base — we can provide examples if you so desire — mostly due to the scale of operations and the style of management being practised. The current expansion of the woodlot program provides an indication of the value of area-based AAC.

In the current competitive process, new woodlots are generating $75.13 a cubic metre of AAC, on average. This does not include the value of private land that is also being pledged into the program. When I say pledged, I mean basically that as a private land owner you agree to manage your private land to the same standard as the Crown land — so inventories, wildlife issues. Basically, in effect, it becomes de facto Crown land–managed private land.

Those are issues that we see as timber supply issues. Mid-term timber supply specific to woodlot licences is on the second page.
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Timber availability. As I noted earlier, when properly located on the landscapes, woodlot licences make timber available from areas that could otherwise not be harvested or harvesting would be severely constrained.

The standing timber inventory is another issue. The woodlot AAC model tends to hold old trees in reserve for the long term, often resulting in more of a standing timber inventory than is actually needed to sustain the long-run allowable annual cut. We calculate our AACs on a model that uses a 250-year time frame, and that model, the particular one that we are using, holds a higher percentage of old timber.

Government should look at identifying surplus volumes and then grant temporary AAC uplifts at a time when the surplus volume is needed as a way to help mitigate mid-term timber supply shortage. If managed correctly, the uplift would not adversely impact the long-term sustainable AAC of the woodlot. There are some things there in how that calculation is done that we see as some opportunities.

Undercut carry-forward. I think you've probably already heard this from several other people, from what I understand, so basically the same thing. It seems such a peculiar rule that we're not allowed to, even though we grew the wood and it's there and ready, we're not allowed to cut it. Enough said on that.

Under free-growing, we feel we should be changing the free-growing rules to stop cutting down and spraying herbicides to kill our fast-growing aspen and other deciduous species which, if left alive, could help fill a void in the mid-term timber supply. I know you've heard this from Brian once before already, but I assure you that this is not only Brian's idea. It's pretty generally conceived amongst woodlot licensees that it makes no sense to go and kill trees when we're trying to grow trees.

Dollars to invest in incremental silviculture. Woodlot licences contain some of the best growing sites in B.C., with potential to produce significantly more timber. However, for years the issue has been where to get the dollars to invest in the land. The federation has three recommendations on this topic.

Recommendation No. 1. The woodlot program is in the process of a 150,000-metre-a-year expansion. To date 41 new woodlots involving 91,000 metres have been awarded, but there's still another 58,000 that is in the process. The government is working towards that target — slowly, but they are working towards that target. The cash component of successful bids has been $6.9 million, which works out to that $75.13 a cubic metre. That's the figure that people are willing to pay for annual allowable cut. It's that simple.

The federation proposes that the cash bids on that remaining 58,000 cubic metres, the part that hasn't been sold yet, be paid into a woodlot incremental silviculture trust and used to fund projects on woodlots that would help mitigate mid-term timber supply shortages.

The trust would be set up and administered by the federation. We have a solid, proven track record. We annually invest forest investment account or land-based investment program, $600,000 to $800,000. We've been up over $1 million per year of essentially government funds that we deliver onto the lands that are woodlots. We've got a long history of doing that kind of thing.

The difference here is that that money would actually come from our own licensees. That would be to deliver incremental silviculture programs.

Recommendation No. 2. Several years ago, the federation gave serious consideration to a tax reform that would allow woodlot licensees and landowners to place pre-tax dollars into a forestry account, with the funds being used for reforestation and to meet free-growing obligations as a cost of doing business.

This is a federal issue. This topic got a lot of support from Quebec, the private landowners in Quebec. An MP from Quebec put a private member's bill into the system. It died on the order paper. Minister Flaherty actually came to the meetings and had long discussions with our reps on those things. They're aware of it, and it's a matter of getting onto the priority list.

However, that same philosophy could apply to setting aside dollars for incremental silviculture projects. Such a tax reform would provide an incentive for landowners, the woodlot licensees to invest in their forests. The federation recommends that the subcommittee give serious consideration to this kind of incentive-based approach to generate funds for basic and incremental forestry.

The third recommendation. Treat the volume gains from an AAC uplift, and target those for harvesting during the mid-term. If an additional 1,000 cubic metres is the volume increase from spacing and fertilization…. If you somewhere find the money to make that investment on the land, you create another 1,000 cubic metres of growth.

The way it works now is that that thousand cubic metres gets amortized out over the full length of your forest rotation — so 70, 90 years, depending on where you are in the province and how good your land is. You take the thousand cubic metres, and you divide it by 70, and each year, that's how much you're allowed to harvest.

We think there's a real opportunity there to take that increased volume, that thousand cubic metres, and target it specifically into the gaps. Put it into years 20 and 30 and 40 where we need to fill the gap.

Currently the treated area is converted from a natural to a managed stand for purposes of setting the AAC. Effectively, this dilutes the volume gain over the entire woodlot licence area and spreads it out over a rotation, 80 to 100 years, and the volume gain becomes insignificant in the big picture. If we can somehow, when we make the investment to grow that volume, target it much more spe-
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cifically into the gaps and fill our gaps with that….

The third topic, mid-term timber supply on private land. There's an estimated three million hectares of private forest land in B.C., including approximately 91,000 that is already dedicated to woodlot licences. In addition, there are reserve lands scattered throughout the province, and at a minimum the province should work with landowners to inventory private lands. The inventory will provide base information to determine what volume may be available from private forests to help mitigate mid-term timber supply issues. It would also help identify management opportunities to increase the yield from private land.

You have to start from somewhere, and typical landowners — certainly in the Interior, where I'm from, but in most parts of the province, Don't treat their timber inventory as anything more than…. Until it's big enough to sell, they really don't worry about it. We think that having a real inventory would be one way to kind of quantify that so people will actually think about: "Well, if I behave differently, in 20 years these trees — I might be able to sell them."

The subcommittee may wish to look at Oregon as a case study based on a presentation from Dr. John Bliss at our federation annual general meeting a few years back. Oregon's private forest land owners made up a substantial portion of the timber shortfall that occurred when harvest levels from the national forests in Oregon were curtailed. They did quite a job there. John is a small tenures extension specialist kind of person down there. Definitely worth talking to.

Second bullet under "Private land" at the bottom of the third page. Reclaiming marginal farmland to forestry is a 100 percent gain for forestry and, we would argue, with no appreciable loss to agriculture. You have to appreciate, as the chairman of the woodlot federation, that of that 850 woodlot licensees, probably fully a third of them and maybe even more than a third of them, are ranchers and farmers because they have the land — right?

The original woodlot licence program — that was the history. It came from the notion of giving a little bit of timber to the rancher so he could log in the winter and farm in the summer. This statement sounds so simple, but believe me, we spent a lot of time getting that one sorted out amongst ourselves.

The federation recommends that the subcommittee examine opportunities to convert marginal farmland, private land, into forests. Funding for reforestation and tax incentives such as creating a tax farm classification equivalent to the current hobby farm status for land tax purposes would likely be required.

The current managed forest classification for land does not come close to agricultural land tax levels, and therefore acts as a disincentive for conversion to forestry. You pay less land tax if you leave your land as a farm than if you convert it to a managed forest. Pretty straightforward, that one.

D. Barnett: Thank you very much for your presentation. I am very fortunate that I talk with the woodlot association and Brian on a regular basis these days, it seems. I was involved, obtained a woodlot with the district of 100 Mile House in 1986 and had quite an education through that process.

I have a few questions around this converting marginal farmland to forestry. The issue is around taxation, land taxation. Of course, there would have to be a new classification, and a lot of work would have to be done on that issue because, as you know, agricultural land gets a 50 percent break on the school taxes. Actually, ranchers have to have farm classification, which is production of some kind of agriculture component, in order to get that status.

The question is, and maybe you've thought about this: how would we go about changing the status and the taxation of that land base?

B. McNaughton: Interestingly, the origins of the woodlot program…. They were called farm woodlots, so they actually started off in the farming world and moved into the forestry world over time. I think there is a classification that exists out there; it's called managed forests. And I think it's a question of adjusting the taxation rates on that more than it is actually rebuilding the system. So I don't think it's actually necessarily that complicated.

B. Routley: We've had presenters come forward with notions, like up to 50 percent of the volume that they currently have under volume-based tenures be converted to long-term tenures. I wondered what your woodlot association would think about that. Is it a good idea? Should there be more of an open bidding process? What would be the value to the volume? I mean, obviously there's a value to it. In the past there used to be appurtenancy tied to granting tree farm licences, for example.

What kind of conditions would you think would be reasonable to put on any kind of tenures that would benefit the community in the long run? Obviously, with your experience with land-based tenures, it would be helpful for this committee to understand what you think about that kind of a transition.

M. Clark: I'll make one comment, and then I'll let Brian. We spent a lot of time debating about whether we were going to include appurtenancy in this presentation, actually.
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I think, generally, woodlot licences…. Given the size and the way they're managed, it's the guy that lives down the street that has the woodlot licence. For the most part, we already have appurtenancy. In a perfect world, if you're a woodlot and you're selling a very small amount of wood, you want to sell it to the buyer next door. You don't want to be shipping it around.

It's arguably social appurtenancy as opposed to technical, legal appurtenancy. That's one comment. I think Brian has got some other….

B. McNaughton: Our appurtenancy is to our families in our communities. If you move away, given the size of our tenures, it doesn't make sense to be trekking back trying to do work on it. What typically happens is that it either gets transferred to somebody in the family, which is the simple process, or to somebody third party. You transact it and move away, so it stays in the area. It's not like we can walk away from the tenure.

As Mark said, we've talked about appurtenancy a lot. Definitely, area-based tenures have advantages, Bill, that you've probably heard about. The ability to invest and then get the return from that investment because you have it under a secure land base, makes a lot of sense.

The question is: are people willing to put up their own money and invest in their area-based tenure with the money out of their own wallet, or are they simply reaching out for government funds to put on the land? If that's the case, then it's probably pretty much a wash, because it's in the timber supply area. If you're the licensee in there…. In this province we've reduced the number of licensees operating in TSAs. They're down to one or two. They are almost like area-based tenures unless we start splitting them up. So it's a little bit different model.

Certainly, I think most people would say that if they're going to have an area-based tenure, it's one thing to control the volume. It's another thing to control the land base, if they're not still in the community operating and running a mill. I would expect that that would have some kind of public feedback.

Whether or not appurtenancy in its old form coming back is the right way or there are some other things, I have to give that some more thought and probably a little bit of public debate, I would think.

Members, we're scheduled for a break here. With your indulgence, I'd like to invite Interfor to come up and present now, and then we'll take our break after that.

R. Slaco: Thanks for your indulgence. I will be speaking on behalf of Interfor today, and I very much appreciate your attention and all the time that you've been spending on this issue.

It's very clear to me that you're committed to try and do what's right for B.C., the non-partisan approach and the thoughtfulness about this critical issue that's a very strongly held view in terms of the connection between timber supply and communities that exists across B.C. The fact that you're here today and have been here and across other communities speaks volumes, I think, and I very much appreciate it.

As far as Interfor goes, I do not have a written presentation. What I thought I would do and what might be most helpful for you is to give you some observations and a perspective from our company. We don't have direct operations in the areas that have been hardest hit by the mountain pine beetle, so in some ways we don't have a direct vested interest in the specific areas. We do have a very strong interest in what's best for B.C., as a principal operator in B.C.

A little about our company. We're not the largest company in B.C. but certainly within the top five in terms of lumber production. We'd be probably the eighth-largest lumber producer in North America and the ninth-largest globally. We do have a very significant interest in what happens regarding the forest industry in British Columbia and any decisions that you may wish to take as a consequence of this crisis that's occurring in some of the areas in the Interior.

Our business is invested in the Interior. In fact, in British Columbia we have five mills, two on the coast and three in the Interior. Two of the mills in the Interior do rely on some portion of beetle-killed wood for their supply, but it's clearly not to the range that other communities are dependent on and will be feeling as a consequence of the downfall in future timber supplies.

I also recognize that you, as a committee, have two excellent resources that you brought on, former chief foresters. I take great comfort in that. I have a lot of respect for those two gentlemen in their past work. I can tell you that Interfor pays very close attention to timber supply reviews and the documents that they have authored in the past.

I also recognize that the current chief forester is in the audience, and I very much appreciate that he has taken the time to sit and listen to a variety of stakeholders' views, because he, as well, will have to turn his mind to making decisions and recommendations as to what they think is right for the province. I think all of those gentlemen will be very helpful in guiding your deliberations on what might be appropriate to do here in B.C.

In terms of our business itself and how it might relate to your work, I did want to share with you what I believe is the future as it relates to how we, as Interfor, see development of the business.

We are very much invested in B.C. The greatest example I can think of is a recent decision we made as a company to build a brand-new sawmill at Adams Lake,
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which is near Kamloops. That investment was done in the middle of the downturn. We completed that project in 2009. The mill itself cost $100 million.

The company made a commitment to B.C. to help support that community and the sustainable future for that community. I can tell you, being involved in that process, that it wasn't a decision that was made lightly. I can also tell you that we paid very close attention to timber supply and the timber supply balance and the future of that, going forward.

I'm sure you've heard a wide range in views and opinions from others already, as to what's appropriate or what's not appropriate. I can tell you, from the perspective we've had, that we have looked at the mountain pine beetle situation in the province as one that has been out of balance in terms of supply and capacity. We have overcapacity in terms of our milling situation, and in consequence of supply, which we see as diminishing as a consequence of the beetle's impact, there is going to be an imbalance there. That was part of our thought process in making that investment.

Anything that government may do that may artificially upset that balance in terms of perhaps making wholesale changes to timber supply boundaries or trying to artificially prop up a facility that is substantially uncompetitive because of a lack of supply, we don't think would be helpful to all of the British Columbia industry. We recognize that that's not an easy decision for some communities to accept, but it's very clear from my involvement in the industry for the past 30 years that it's simply not possible to have a mill in every community.

For British Columbia to be successful, we need a highly capitalized, modern, efficient industry that can support exporting those products to global customers. We have to be competitive in doing that.

The other critical factor, and one that I can only impress upon you as something that's an absolute must, is that the foundation for our business going forward is sustainable forest management. We believe that very strongly. That's the core of what we sell our customers.

We believe strongly that B.C. has been building a foundation of strong, sustainable forest management performance, and we would be very concerned if we felt that there were going to be significant changes to the principles of sustainable forestry as a consequence of trying to prop up timber supply artificially, in a manner that would damage or perhaps harm British Columbia's reputation.

The fact that you've had representations from other groups such as the professional foresters and the involvement of others, I think, has given you some advice on that already. I can only stress that from Interfor's perspective it's a very primary consideration for us.

We are very much committed to British Columbia and its future, and we very much support the principles of sustainable forestry that we have been going down a pathway on to build our future. We think it certainly should be a strong consideration in how you think about the type of decisions you will need to make going forward with this process itself.

I also, as I said earlier, would like to suggest that a thoughtful consideration to all of the views is one that is very much needed in this case. It's not one where you should be put in the position to try and pick a winner or a loser. Ultimately, if you do what's best for all of British Columbia, you will be doing the right thing.

If I could, I'll make a comment about what I said yesterday in relationship to the bioeconomy. The reason that we made a presentation to you yesterday was because we felt that was best for British Columbia.

While, as I said, it's not going to solve your immediate problems, it is something, again, like how you view the practice of forestry in B.C. as a consequence of this crisis that will ultimately determine our future. So choose wisely in what you do. Call on the resources of professionals that we have in this province, and we've got a strong group of them.

You've got some good resources to consider, and if you wish to ask our advice for anything specific, I'd be more than happy to provide some comments to any questions that you have.

I think our main points are: don't harm the sustainable base for our province, and be careful about how you may affect the competitiveness, because when we make investments in this province, we do have choices. We have choices in other jurisdictions. If you upset the balance on that competitive playing field, you can be harming how businesses choose to invest in this province.

We think we have a very strong case for what we've done in the Interior. We'd like to continue that and make future investments in this province.

B. Routley: We've heard very clearly from all the other interests that were involved in the land use planning that we should not make decisions that could impact those land use decisions without going back to the community, that they would take great exception to us doing that. Essentially, there was a long process. You know, a lot of people invested a lot of time and effort into those land use plans.

You haven't actually said it out loud. Are you basically saying that you do not want to see us tinkering with land use planning processes without, as a committee, whomping up a few recommendations that change what they've done retroactively or, effectively, renege on the promises that were made? Would that be a good idea?

R. Slaco: To be clear on that question, we haven't said no to making change. I think change is healthy from the point of view of looking at whether the current plans and the rules are currently serving their needs. Again, you
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have the advice of professionals that can advise you as to what might be appropriate or not appropriate in terms of the degree.

Our view is that wholesale changes that would harm our reputation would not be advantageous to the province to take. Changes that would be part of any type of streamlining and modernizing a view of how we look at different conservation measures, how we might look at visual-quality objectives or any other aspect that we regulate on, are possible and are healthy.

You've got a number of good suggestions already that I've heard of. My sense is that you should continue down that process.

It won't be significant enough to create enough supply to artificially support a facility that, fundamentally, has been damaged by the lack of supply from the impacts of the beetle. But absolutely, you can be looking at that. I think you can use this process as being helpful to the province in general in terms of how it might look at modernizing and continuing to look at how best to apply rules to the forests that make sense not only for the forests but for people.

I know that Bill and Donna and Eric and others…. You're all very much committed to the communities that you operate in. Ultimately, the forests are serving people, but it's the degree to which you would go about and change that. You used the word "tinker." It's a good description, perhaps, but wholesale change would not be good, in my opinion.

D. Barnett: Thank you for your presentation. I commend you on your new mill. I've been past it, had a look at it.

When you did your business plan, though, you must have taken into consideration the pine beetle, because it has been around here for quite a while. In essence, the pine beetle will not affect the long-term viability, I understand, of the new mill. But if we tinker, as Bill said, with boundaries, that could have a major effect on the Adams Lake mill. Is that correct?

R. Slaco: Yes. Our catchment area definitely incorporates areas outside of the Kamloops timber supply area. Kamloops does have an impact from the pine beetle itself.

R. Slaco: We've factored that into our consideration around the investment that we've made. We also did factor in a demand-and-supply balance going forward.

It's clear in our minds that there will be rationalization in the industry. For Interfor, we had the choice of either being a long-term survivor by having and supporting a competitive mill in the area where we operated or not. Our view at the time was that we wanted to have a modern, efficient mill that could sustain our business, and the community that we operate in, for the long term.

That cost us a significant investment, but we made it, very clearly, on the basis that there would be rationalization in the industry.

R. Slaco: Area-based tenure does have some promise. Again, it depends on how you apply it. I've known in the past that anytime you attempt to try and change something significantly, it's not as easy as it might sound.

There is some value in going through the exercise, I believe, because the merits of stewardship that go with area-based tenures, I think, are still compelling, but the process of getting there is still a difficult one. It needs to be carefully done in making sure that the division in determining those areas is done fairly, in terms of how they're being administered.

N. Macdonald (Deputy Chair): Quickly, who are you certified with, for the most part? How much of your area is certified? Then, maybe in fairly general terms, what's the importance of the certification in marketing the product?

R. Slaco: So 100 percent of our operations in B.C. are certified, and we use the sustainable forestry initiative for all of our business in B.C. as the principal certification. We have, in one small area on the coast, a Forest Stewardship Council certification, but the primary certification is SFI. To our global partners, in terms of customers, the SFI certification has mutual recognition with the PEFC, which is essentially more of a European or global standard. We can sell our products with the PEFC label in some of those marketplaces.

The principal part of certification — what we found, and why we're concerned about sustainable forestry — is that our customers do care about where their product comes from. It's their reputation at stake, and certainly, it's our reputation in British Columbia as being a reliable and sustainable supplier that we've built our business on.

It's clear that it's more than just sustainability that we sell to the customers. We also sell on price, quality and service. But that environmental certification is one of the principal points that we sell on, and we think it is important for us to continue to offer that in the future.

One clear example of this is…. You're well aware of the growing business that we've all had in China. Interfor, like many other companies, has had great success in selling more products in China. Two years ago I was asked to give a presentation on green building in China, in Beijing.

I mean, the world is waking up to the fact that environmental integrity and how we treat the environment globally is important in what we do. It's not the princi-
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pal piece, from the point of view of being the only one, but it's a consideration. That may well distinguish us in terms of our competitors, and we should be using that to our advantage.

E. Foster: Back to your investment in Adams Lake. I'm curious about the mill there, having dumped a lot of loads of logs into the 17-mile dump on the north end of the lake a few years back, and the timber profile out there. Did you go to a…? Is there a head-rig there? What kind of a…?

R. Slaco: It is a wonderful facility, if you ever get a chance to go through it. It is what the future of milling should look like, certainly going forward in the province. It was well designed in terms of addressing beetle-damaged wood in terms of things like dust and breakage. We're very proud of that fact.

It is a highly efficient mill that can operate in low market conditions as well as good conditions. There's resiliency there. The one really interesting aspect of that mill that I think is worthwhile considering, and this is why I talk about the future of British Columbia, is that for that mill itself…. The cost of that mill was $100 million to construct, and 98 percent of that, $98 million of that, was spent in British Columbia by people providing goods and services and equipment.

To me, that's a tremendous story. We can build efficient, modern mills using British Columbia goods and services here in this province, and we should be supporting that. We should be creating a modern, globally competitive business that not only produces wood but produces equipment to manufacture that wood. We need to take a global perspective on how we approach forestry in this province, and we should be looking at creating a vision to be a global leader and then acting like it.

What we've done at Adams Lake, in my view, is one of those pieces in being able to demonstrate that we have the capability here in British Columbia of building modern mills, operating competitively and servicing our global customers on a reliable basis.

Interestingly enough, of that 98 percent that was spent in British Columbia, it was largely small-town B.C. The biggest community, in terms of where the money was spent, was Kelowna, followed by Prince George, Salmon Arm and then Delta. That money was spent over 30 different communities in the province.

J. Rustad (Chair): Thanks. We are just about out of time. We've got three more people that would like to ask questions, so if we could keep questions and answers brief, we'll get to them. Otherwise, we will not be able to get to everybody. I had myself on the list next.

I wanted to ask about the Adams Lake mill as well. How many cubic metres per year did you design that mill for consumption?

J. Rustad (Chair): Just a follow-up to that. Why did you pick that particular number, and what do you think of the economics of a mill that might be, say, 600,000 or 700,000 cubic metres to mill per year?

R. Slaco: Well, each mill in the province can be designed for different things. For us, as I said earlier, it's a two-line mill. It was designed such that…. Most of the business, when you look at lumber prices, is a supply-driven business. If there is too much supply, the price clearly goes down in terms of lumber.

In a down market, that mill was designed so that it could operate still efficiently on one line. In a down market, if we had to operate on one line, we could. In the past, in previous situations, we've seen where mills couldn't survive unless they were running at near capacity. That was one of the flexibility aspects in how we're approaching construction.

Could a smaller facility operate successfully in B.C.? Yes, I believe they could. Again, it depends on the market that they're choosing to go after and how efficiently they can supply product coming out of that mill from the cost base in terms of log costs going into that mill. We're all very much challenged in terms of log costs.

Clearly, a consideration for your group is that the higher the log costs are, the less money that's available to invest in modernizing your mills. If we're spending all of our money chasing after logs and transporting them huge distances and have this huge competition piece that is driving those log costs up, there won't be money to modernize your mills and invest in them.

J. Rustad (Chair): Thank you. We only have minute left, so I'm going to see if we can get very quick questions and answers.

B. Stewart: Thanks very much, Ric. I want to talk to you a little bit about utilization of the logs. Knowing that you cut in a variety of areas, I have no idea about the Adams Lake mill and the perfect size going through it. But we do see out in the bush, certainly, underutilization, which you spoke a little bit to yesterday. I wonder about the idea about sharing of fibre with other mills in terms of….

You know, it's a very competitive industry. There's no question. I guess until everybody got to China they didn't realize how big that market really was. Of course, if it could be more profitable, it would be great. Is the idea of
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a different approach in terms of logs coming into yards and being utilized by other mills that have a different profile something that works for companies like Interfor?

R. Slaco: There is trading that goes on, on a regular basis in terms of trying to find the right log that would fit the profile of your mill. We, as a company, have trades, and I think going forward in the future we'll probably be doing much more of that, in terms of trading between companies, where our profile is needed with one diet of logs and another mill's should be something different. Both of us will have a better business as a consequence of those trades.

In terms of the other aspect, you were referring to utilization. There may be profiles out there that currently aren't assigned profiles but have different uses. I think we want to be open-minded in terms of how we would look at that. I can tell you that when B.C. Hydro had announced their phase 2 call for power we had submitted a proposal for a Grand Forks mill, to operate a co-gen facility down there that would be complementary to the existing sawmill. It would be part of the larger capital plan that we had designed for that area.

Certainly, our company is thinking about those types of applications. We weren't successful in that process, but we're still thinking about doing things like that. As I mentioned yesterday as well, we're constantly looking at finding partners in ways that can extract the highest and best value for the complete profile of what the forest has to offer beyond what we produce ourselves.

Ric, thank you very much for your presentation. At this time the committee will take a recess until 1:45.

J. Rustad (Chair): Good afternoon, and welcome back from our recess to the Special Committee on Timber Supply.

D. Janz: My name is Doug Janz. I'm the chairperson for the forestry committee for the B.C. Wildlife Federation.

To give you a little reminder of who we are, the federation was formed back in the mid-'50s, so we're likely the oldest and largest volunteer conservation organization in the province. We have about 40,000-plus members affiliated with about a hundred clubs across the province, and we represent those residents whose aims are similar to us: to protect, enhance and promote the wise use of the environment for the benefit of present and future generations.

We went through a strategic planning exercise not too long ago, so now we have two main goals for the organization — to promote British Columbia's use and enjoyment of fish, wildlife and outdoor recreation; and secondly, to become a recognized, credible leader of conservation of the province's fish and wildlife resources. We have a number of strategies, but our priority strategy is to promote the sustainability, diversity and productivity of fish and wildlife habitats across the province and associated populations.

We conducted a membership questionnaire not too long ago. It may be a bit of a surprise to some people, who may think of the B.C. Wildlife Federation as an all-hook-and-bullet kind of interest — which, to some extent it is, for sure — but when we asked for our members to identify the issues important to them, the first two were both wildlife and habitat conservation and sustainability. They outranked shooting sports, wildlife allocation issues — which are pretty controversial. We're there for looking at present and future sustainable use.

Okay, so what values and principles should guide the evaluation decision-making? Well, these values I mentioned to you are sort of how we see this thing unfolding. Obviously, many of our members are employed in the forest sector and certainly want to look at and support the principle of sustainability of job opportunities, but not at the risk of jeopardizing the viability of other forest resources and ecosystem services.

We need to manage our forests on a long-term, sustained basis. That, in turn, determines the timber supply and associated manufacturing facilities, not the other way around — rather than having existing mill capacity, or whatever, dictate the allowable annual cut and the need for more timber supply. That is not sustainable.

The major principle — you're well aware of this, of course; that's why you're here — is that the vast majority of the B.C. forests are public. They belong to the people of B.C. Decisions on transition strategies and potential mitigation actions must include active participation by local communities and by all so-called stakeholders.

I imagine that, if not before now, you will be hearing, probably, from Bill Bourgeois of the Healthy Forests, Healthy Communities initiative, which he heads up. He confirmed the communities' interest in these issues during his community dialogue sessions across the province last year. Communities want to be better informed
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regarding the state of the local forest lands, they want more diverse economic development opportunities from these local lands, and they want to have more influence on decisions regarding management of the local forests.

Those are what we consider the values and principles that should be guiding this exercise.

How should decisions regarding potential actions to mitigate the timber supply impacts be made, and by whom? We feel that this is best answered in the context of broad land use planning. There needs to be a lot better government leadership and ability to provide direction and coordination of natural resource management at the broad management unit level, whether it's the TSA level or something larger or a bit smaller, whatever sort of makes sense from an economic and environmental perspective.

The need for this was exemplified the best…. At least, a good example was the investigation by the Forest Practices Board into the salvage of mountain pine beetle and, basically, the failure of licences to implement the chief forester's guidance for consideration to plan for increased mature retention, which is the so-called conservation uplift, to parallel the increase in the AAC to go along with mountain pine beetle salvage logging.

Essentially, the board discovered that that was not done. It's not really a great surprise, when you have a multitude of licensees — both volume-based and, I guess, a few area-based. To expect them to integrate and coordinate their activities to meet the chief forester's guidance — I mean, it doesn't have a chance of succeeding, and it didn't. There has to be more government oversight in terms of leading those kinds of planning exercises.

The government, in response to the Forest Practices Board report, indicated — last year, anyway — that a sustainable forest management planning framework was under development that would integrate all aspects of landscape-level operational planning and be implemented with MTSA or a similar management unit. The B.C. Wildlife Federation definitely supports that type of planning framework.

Such a collaborative, inclusive multistage or planning framework would provide clear, measurable objectives and direction necessary to inform forest professionals who are expected to make decisions to balance economic and environmental and social benefits from our public lands under the broad direction of FRPA.

Such a planning framework would also include other industries and forest value interests such as mining, energy, tourism, etc. Thus, most activities looking at natural resource use on these large landscapes could be developed together, integrated and coordinated at the broad level.

The agencies which sort of lead the process…. Specifically, Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations seems to be a fairly logical agency. A lot of the old dirt agencies are now together. We think that the recommendations coming out of that kind of framework would likely be sent to cabinet for approval, but the federation is pretty adamant that the position and responsibilities of AAC determination by the independent chief forester must remain intact, if not actually strengthened. The chief forester's guidance for consideration seems to be a little weak in terms of providing the direction that's required.

"What specific information about your local area would you like the committee to know?" Okay, this submission is obviously not specific to a local area. I'm sort of representing the whole provincial perspective on behalf of the federation. I know that you've had at least some regional BCWF representatives make submissions to you.

One of the big concerns of federation members relates to reforestation and the apparent reduction in stand-level biodiversity in our managed forests. Many members in the Interior indicate that the continual harvest of mixed-species, first-growth forests, followed by reforestation with monoculture or near-monocultural stands, is one of the agents for our current situation in terms of the mountain pine beetle.

Industrial forestry has typically led to ecosystem simplification. Healthy forest ecosystems are complex and diverse. Tree species diversity, both within stand and across the landscape, is an important consideration for managing future forest conditions that are healthy, resilient to disease, adaptable to climate change and offering timber supply opportunities in terms of mixed stands — the hardwood component, for example.

"What cautions and advice do you have for this committee in considering whether and how to mitigate mid-term timber supply?" I know you're all aware of this stuff. Most — I'll say many, I guess — of the non-timber reserves within the timber-harvesting land base that are being considered to help mitigate timber supply were designated under provisions that capped the size and/or volume to minimize impacts to timber supply.

The B.C. Wildlife Federation places the highest value on reserves designed to protect important fish and wildlife habitats, biodiversity and representative of old serial stages. In general, we do not support any harvest in reserves, especially those with undamaged stands.

Depending on the local objectives and circumstances regarding when these reserves were established, there may be opportunity to harvest dead pine, for example, to provide maybe early serial foraging areas within a designated ungulate winter range. To help recruit an old-growth management area that's now dead pine, it might be best to harvest that dead pine and manage for the future. I know on the coast here in the past we've applied silvicultural techniques to basically create ungulate winter range in terms of thermal cover and snow interception cover.

What we do is we favour the activities in investments
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in making better use of existing wood supply and prompt reforestation and stand-tending activities. The recent introduction of new tenures to provide access to logging slash and debris remaining after industrial harvest operations is a long time coming, but it's certainly a move in the right direction.

There is a huge supply of low-quality timber currently included in the non-contributing land base that should be evaluated for potential use to support bioenergy sector development and value-added wood production, especially the wood pellet industry.

I was reminded of that this morning. I was coming over from Nanaimo on the ferry, looking up Howe Sound, and recalled a story not too long ago about how Howe Sound Pulp and Paper is now producing pulp, paper and power. They're using wood fibre that comes from dead pine in the Merritt area. That's a fair distance away, so there are transportation costs and everything else that everybody talks about. They're hauling a really long distance. That's where they rely on their supply.

These tenures certainly will open a door for some of these, especially startup companies that need a secure supply of wood fibre. It doesn't have to be standing trees, and it's not.

Another recent government release of the forest sector strategy of B.C. indicates that "ongoing investment in reforestation, silvicultural activities and forest carbon projects will result in fast-growing forests to address timber supply challenges created by the mountain pine beetle infestation." That forest sector strategy also addresses the need for landscape fire management planning to reduce wildfire risk to communities, and can also include the use of prescribed fire to create, basically, wildlife habitat in these complex, healthy forest ecosystems.

These are the kind of activities that we really support for addressing the mid-term timber supply issue while also contributing to employment opportunities.

As I mentioned, the juvenile spacing of dense young stands and possible commercial thinning to decrease competition, resulting in shorter rotations and/or increased future stand quality, should be looked at.

I know that in some of the background material there was an example, I think, of a fairly intensive fertilization of stands. There's also, I guess, some doubt about the efficiency, cost-benefit analysis of such a significant investment.

As a bit of a sidebar, there is some interesting research being conducted by Dr. Chris Chanway at UBC related to nitrogen-fixing bacteria residing in lodgepole pine that seems to explain its ability to grow on nutrient-poor sites. His lab there inoculated some seedlings with a bacterial strain and had significantly greater biomass and foliar nitrogen content versus non-inoculated controls.

The amount of nitrogen was actually derived, a large part of it, from the atmosphere, rather than through the soil. That varied from 27 to 70 percent. They're indicating it may be possible to manipulate these bacterial populations to maximize nitrogen fixation, thereby preparing seedlings to fertilize themselves after being planted.

One example, I guess, in terms of the research community, in terms of innovations in products and ecology. I'm not sure if they're presenting to you or not, but if you're interested in following up on some of that….

We are constantly reminded about government's fiscal commitment to balance the budget, and therefore not to expect budget lifts. That's totally understandable. However, there is a disturbing long-term downward trend in provincial investment in the management of forests, fish, wildlife and parks.

In the last 15 years, funding for the non-resource agencies…. Now, this excludes the big three of health, education and social services. These non-resource agencies have more than doubled in funding, while funding for the renewable resource ministries has fallen over 50 percent over the last 15 years.

Basically, it appears pretty evident that the dirt ministries are pretty much a fairly low priority with the government.

Many of the issues facing us today are directly related to outdated information, inventory programs and a lack of current data on the status of many of our natural resources, including the forest resources.

Increased support for inventory programs and monitoring the status and trends of the various forest and range resources in response to management prescriptions, mountain pine beetle, climate change, etc., must be an integral component of this current exercise. There's an old saying that you can't really manage what you don't measure.

We are also, I guess, somewhat curious as to why we are here right now in terms of apparent recent urgency to this issue. As we all know, there has been awareness of a major timber supply decrease looming in the near future following the salvage of mountain pine beetle. It's been evident since the early 2000s, when government started working on some of their action plans.

Communities have worked together via the three coalition groups. They produced diversification strategies and action plans to prepare the long-term economic transition required to adapt to the decline in timber supply to the traditional forest sector.

Now we find ourselves engaged in a very time-constrained process that is expected to make recommendations to government next month, with an apparent focus on short-term mitigation options, to the detriment of planning for long-term economic and environmental sustainability. We certainly understand the need for action. We simply caution that a short-term political solution is not the solution.

With that, I want to say that we really appreciate the
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opportunity to make a presentation to you today. We intend to stay engaged, and we wish to participate on future planning initiatives over timber supply.

J. Rustad (Chair): Doug, thank you very much. I'll look for questions from members.

B. Routley: I want to be certain what you're saying. I think you're saying that you don't support any changes to the land use planning processes without taking it back to the community. Is that what you're saying?

D. Janz: The people that should be at the table have to include community representation. I'm not saying that it maybe has to go back to the community, but the community has to be involved, actually participating in how government is going to manage the local landscape.

You may have people there — like I said, maybe the ministry, the professionals in the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations. They have the data, etc. Share it with the community. Share it with industry and all of the other interests.

You can integrate so many things. You can integrate the fire management plans. You can integrate infrastructure services, resource roads. You might be able to service a mine and access some low-quality timber at the same time for the pellet industry, small power, biofuels, whatever. I'm saying that it would be efficient, I think, in the long run to produce a coordinated, integrated plan for that specific area, whether it's TSA or whatever it is.

B. Stewart: Thanks, Doug. I want to clarify. You were talking about those protected and constrained areas, but you started to kind of say that if they were infected by pine beetle kill, etc…. Did you see some way of harvesting those, like the selective harvest or some other methodology that would still protect the values?

D. Janz: Yeah, I'm saying that, depending on what the original objectives for that reserve were, some of those definitely involved maintaining live trees — right? If most of that reserve area has succumbed to pine beetle, I'm saying that there may be opportunities.

Again, this would be information from the more local level, how those reserves…. I think there would be opportunity in some areas to harvest that pine and get a young stand growing there as soon as possible. I wanted to reiterate that we do not support logging of the living trees, which in many cases are not pine but, in many cases, is pretty attractive to the forest industry.

N. Macdonald (Deputy Chair): First, thank you for the presentation. Thanks for the work you've done on this and the work your organization does to recognize that it's not only participating in these things but on the ground that your members are very active.

The points you’ve made are really important ones. You talk about inventory, replanting. You have a membership. It is massive. It is heavily invested. My relatives that are members…. A lot of the time, the vote-determining issues are issues related to what you're talking about today.

Inventory, replanting. The struggle that any political party will have is.... You pointed out that money has gone elsewhere. There are challenges in getting money. I guess, as an organization, what do you do to sort of make the case that we just need to give a government a mandate to invest back in the land? Is that something that you've considered?

I'm not talking about anything partisan. We're all rural. We all recognize the same thing. An awful lot of the investment that needs to be made in the land is up against some pretty strong competition. So as an organization, what are you doing to make the case that we have to reinvest, and replanting and inventory and the things that we care about here?

D. Janz: Well, I guess in a very general sense, the case is for long-term sustainability of the timber and all the non-timber resources. You know, the coast has gone through a lot of transition over the last decade or two. There was Forest Renewal B.C., and there was quite a bit of money available to invest in silvicultural activities and whatnot. Regardless of the government, if the political will is there to do something, there will be some money made available.

You mentioned that we do a lot of on-the-ground grunt work on a volunteer basis — right? But it's very site-specific, obviously. Our members want to see some diversity in the landscape and opportunities to get out there and everything else. First and foremost they want to see those opportunities sustained into the future, including job opportunities. We'll lobby who is…. I think we're starting to get a little bit better at lobbying government, and we'll do that, regardless of who's in power.

There are a lot of strong, strong feelings towards environmental health within the B.C. Wildlife Federation. There are a lot of dedicated folks.

J. Rustad (Chair): Well, Doug, seeing no other questions, thank you very much for your presentation and taking some time to present us with the information.

D. Janz: Yeah, I'll get an e-mail out for this work in progress here, too, very soon.

J. Rustad (Chair): Thanks again. We accept written submissions until July 20, so you've got a little bit of time.

John, John and Bob, welcome. Introduce yourselves,
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and it's over to you.

J. Lawrence: I'm John Lawrence. I work with Brinkman and Associates, but I'm the current president of the Western Silvicultural Contractors Association.

J. Betts: My name is John Betts, and I'm the executive director of the Western Silvicultural Contractors Association.

J. Lawrence: We'd like to thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today, and we appreciate that this committee has come together in, hopefully, what we are taking as a very bipartisan way to try and look at this issue. It's been on our agenda for a number of years now, and we're quite concerned about it.

Our presentation today is kind of in three different components. We're not necessarily addressing directly the questions. Perhaps in the question period afterwards we're going to have some brief comments.

From our perspective, what has happened with the MPB has obviously dramatic impacts. I'm sure you've heard lots about what that means in terms of the forest industry, as well as some of the opportunities related to bioenergy and so forth. We think a lot of those components fit into what we're talking about. What we're talking about is one component of a way to move forward in this situation.

With the impact of the MPB, we're seeing, obviously, dramatic drop-offs in the timber supply in some key areas of the province. It's not everywhere, which is very fortunate, but it is in key areas. We're seeing a dramatic change in the incidence of catastrophic fire, and we're hearing reports that fire management branch is worried that they can't fight some of these fires unless the weather changes. Another area is the whole incidence of increased flooding as the water tables are less attenuated by the forests in these watersheds.

Another thing to keep in mind with the falldown in that timber supply is that a key actor on the landscape in terms of doing management of that landscape, the forest industry, is going to be dramatically reduced. There are impacts there in terms of all of the values that are managed through that particular management strategy, through the forest industry. One way or another, that's another significant impact that government is going to have to face as those actors recede from the landscape in these critical areas.

In our view what's needed is really a landscape-level plan. There are a lot of areas…. It's not universal across the landscape. You need to look strategically at the landscape and do it across a number of management units. In order to do that effectively, government has to be bold and very unified in terms of how they're going to do it. There are going to be a lot of stakeholders who are going to find that approach difficult and want to stay within their particular sector or their particular interest.

There are going to have to be policies and incentives that will encourage people to look at this differently. We'll get to that as Bob talks a little bit more about what's currently happening and what we could do differently — the notion of government acting in a bipartisan way and very, very boldly to push this forward so that we can make strategic investments.

What we're really thinking about is in terms of looking at this landscape. Look where you have the watershed impacts, where you have the fire fuel buildup, and where those overlap, look at strategies to restore those sites for the quality of the watershed, to reduce the fuel incidence and also, by way of that work, increase the future timber supply.

At this point I'll turn it over to Bob, who's going to talk a bit about what we're currently seeing in those impacts and how we could change it. Then we'll go over to John, who'll talk about how this work can work for the economy as well, and then I'll come back to some comments about how that would work.

I'm going to pick up on John's note about the whole fire issue. The Insurance Bureau of Canada came out with a report in June. They estimated, based on their research with University of Western Ontario climatologists, that the incidence of wildfire and the area burned is going to increase dramatically over the next 50 years. Basically, B.C. could see an increase in burned area of over 50 percent over what they're currently seeing, on average.

Wildfire management branch also produced a submission to this committee where they basically looked at the combination of fire, weather, climate change and fuels and surmised that we're going to see some big fires — chances are, in the several millions of hectares in size. Their ability to suppress those fires, because of changes in fire conditions, is going to be significantly impaired. I've been working with Parks Canada recently in doing large-scale dead lodgepole pine burns. I'll tell you that in early May the fire intensity is stuff that we've never seen or measured before. So that's coming down the pipe.

One of the things that it means in regards to timber supply, the treasury, society and the environment, is that the costs are going to go up. From 2000 to 2010 here in B.C. we spent $2 billion fighting fires. That was just the direct suppression costs.

Some analysis that others have looked at is that that's a fraction of what the actual costs are. They're often two to 30 times that if you start adding up all the additional indirect and additional costs. Some examples are the 2001 Chisholm fire from Alberta, which burned 116,000
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hectares, $10 million to suppress and $35 million in indirect and associated costs; and the Cerro Grande fire in New Mexico in 2000. Only 17,000 hectares burned, about $33 million to put it out and $936 million in indirect and additional costs. These are often human health effects, infrastructure damage, loss to investments like plantations.

The biggest one is watersheds. When southern California had their fires in 2000, it only burned 50,000 hectares, $16 million to suppress, but it was $1.14 billion in costs that were associated with watershed restoration. Those are very real costs. In a lot of cases we don't have really good data, but the ones we do have, they are staggering in the scope and scale of the costs.

Those are some things that whoever forms government has to keep in mind, and they don't just come about the year after the fire. They'll come for years and years after the fire. In Denver following their fire in 2002 in Hayman, they're spending upwards of $20 million, $30 million a year in sediment control and secondary and tertiary filtration on their water systems for the city of Denver. Once you lose the watershed, it's hard to replace it.

Some of the things that we can seriously do.... John's made reference to some of this. Basically, we've got to do that strategic-level analysis, spatially strategic analysis. We have on the landscape what are called firesheds. Fire tends to move according to topography and weather patterns. We know where they are, based on historic fire analysis, and B.C. has a great digital fire atlas system which we use in our analysis. It'll tell us where we can expect those fires to be and where they're going to go.

When you start putting speed bumps in the way of those fires…. We can do that in the form of aspen fuel breaks, increased utilization of forest fuels, strategically placed harvest systems. We've got to do a lot more prescribed burning. We have to reduce the fuel load on the landscape.

We need to make our system, in reacting to these disturbances, more nimble and flexible. When these crises occur, we can't react very fast under our current regulatory and tenure-based system. When these things happen, we have to be able to jump on them quickly and solve them before they become huge problems.

J. Betts: I'm going to follow on Bob's point. I think what we're saying, in not a particularly veiled way, is that we're going to be paying for catastrophic relief in the future based on the unfolding of the landscape in terms of fire and floods. It's not just timber that's in the array of consequences that flow out of this current condition on the land.

To paraphrase the former USDA chief forester, who in 2003 said of their own experience in the U.S. that we can put out 98 or 99 percent of the fires but that the 1 percent or the 0.1 percent are doing 90 percent of the damage. We can't fight them. The only way to do that is to "take the heat out of the woods," as he put it in his own words.

That's where our workforce comes into play here. We're typically thought of as the tree planting industry, but I want to define us a lot more broadly. What we really are is the restoration industry, and I think in addressing the problems that John and Bob have, our industry plays a significant part.

To set the scene a bit, because this goes to the points about the values embedded in the landscape, of the 22 million hectares that make up our timber harvest land base, almost half of those are in second growth. Those are managed stands. They represent an investment of public dollars somewhere in the neighbourhood of about $10 billion, at least.

It's interesting to note that when they come to maturity, when they mature, they'll be worth somewhere in the neighbourhood of $100 billion to $125 billion. That's not a bad return on your investment. Of course, as businessmen we are always treated as costs, so maybe that says something about where society places its values. But I'm not here to carp about how prices aren't going as we would like to see in the industry.

Nevertheless, the value of investing in silviculture…. I think you've probably heard from a number of other people that it's an obvious thing to do. I would caution it a bit. It may not be as simple as simply reforesting. We've got to do a lot of other things in the woods, I think, to achieve this goal of recalibrating the landscape, if you will, so that it can tolerate the disturbances that we're going to see and still produce for us.

By the way, the last few years wildfire smoke has been our largest major B.C. export measured by the tonne, so I think that gives you a sense of where we're going in that regard. We want to mitigate that.

Silviculture, I think, has one immediate advantage in that for every dollar that you spend…. This is the point I'd like you to sleep on tonight, because that's when your memory is actually going to work. For every dollar spent on a silviculture investment, about 70 percent of that goes directly into the workers' pockets in terms of wages and benefits. Another 10 percent probably goes into the administration and another 15 into material and services. You're looking at somewhere in the neighbourhood of 90 percent of every dollar spent goes immediately into the pockets and benefits communities. The other 10 percent is taken to dubious accounts in the Cayman Islands, but that's another story which I won't address at this point.

You've got a very efficient way to generate short-term relief for communities that are trying to catch their breath after something terrible happens. You've also got, I think, a very strong chance in the long term of getting out of the seasonality of this. We've done some polling, and we're doing some very nice work thanks to the support of the government through the labour market partnership program. Seventy percent of our workforce right
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now consider themselves underemployed, and they'd very much like to work close to the home.

I can see, as we evolve ways of funding — we're going to talk about that next — that you're going to be able to have…. You'll always have the seasonal workforce, but you're going to have restoration workers, as I will call them, who work adjacent to communities, managing the watersheds, the firesheds, working in the wildland-urban interface.

They may be involved in entrepreneurial activities such as taking some of the biomass. They're removing and selling it to heat the schools in the community, if we get that far along. They'll be trained in firefighting themselves, so you'll have a resident, competent body of B.C.-based firefighters. They'll be skilled in prescribed burn and a whole lot of other areas — in other words, a whole way of creating year-round employment in the silviculture sector.

The second point I want you to fall asleep on tonight is restoration, not just silviculture and tree planting.

J. Lawrence: Basically, to keep it around this topic in brief so that we could maybe talk more in the questions, what we're suggesting is to really go out on the landscape and not be hemmed in by the constraints and look at where these fuel-break issues and watershed restoration issues overlap and make strategic investments in those areas as one component, which you could build together with a bioenergy and power strategy.

I don't think we're too far from getting there. We have a lot of information already. We have a huge talent pool within the province to be able to put together that kind of analysis. Then it becomes a question of: "Well, how do we pay for it?" We always run into this in forestry that unless you can squeeze it out of a 2-by-4 or a tonne of pulp, there's just no money for it.

We reject that notion. We think that the money is there. As Bob was pointing out, we're already spending the money. We're spending it on fire suppression, the impacts of those fires, the watershed restoration. A lot of this money would mitigate and offset some of those costs, which we're going to find are coming our way anyway. And as I said earlier, as the timber supply crunch comes and some of these actors move off the landscape, there are going to be costs there anyway. So you might as well be out there making change.

In the areas where this is affecting people, it's a hard wall that they're going into. I'm sure you've heard this a lot. You've travelled around the province, so it's not news. It's a very hard wall. This is a dramatic time, and it takes some dramatic action. I see that as an opportunity both for, obviously, the silviculture sector and all of those communities as well to get engaged in the future. But it has to be done on the landscape level and in a unified, bold way that brings together those stakeholders.

There are going to be some licensees, for example, who are not going to want to play in this. They're going to need some incentive so that it makes it work for them to come into it. There are going to be communities that have to have much more input than they currently do in terms of the process to make this happen. But we believe it's very possible.

As far as the funding, in terms of offsetting those costs, which are going to happen anyway, we always come back to this issue that the federal government made a $1 billion commitment at the beginning of the crisis back in 2003, and to date I don't know if they've spent 30 or 40 percent. It depends how they do the math, if they want to include the stimulus funding and so forth, but they've spent a very small fraction of that. We think it is time to call in that commitment.

In the past we had FRDA agreements, two of them. I think it's important to reanimate this. This is a very, very large issue for the forest sector and for the management of the land base that those forests occupy in this province. It's going to start to happen in other provinces as well, so we need to create the model now for dramatically changing this so that 60 years from now, and I think it was the ABCFP who made that point, we should be able to look back and say: "We made the right decisions. We were bold, and we took dramatic action when it was required."

The other point on that, as well, is in terms of the federal role. The federal government has been directly funding silviculture and forest management in other provinces. We haven't seen that direct funding for that, other than coming through stimulus funding. I think there's something to tap into there that hasn't been tapped into yet. Those announcements happen quite regularly from other provinces.

Another issue that's also important to consider is the fact that there are large, large subsidies to other players in the resource sector, specifically the oil and gas sector and the mineral sector. We just don't see those kinds of direct and indirect subsidies coming through to the forest sector. I think it's time to recognize again that, as the prime manager of the land base, the forest sector should see some benefit to that role that they play, which is beyond just managing timber. It's managing those various values that people rely on, on the landscape.

The oil and gas sector right now, for example, has had multiple billions of dollars committed for their attempt to do carbon sequestration of some of their emissions. That's a very unproven technology. We know that trees and healthy forests sequester carbon. So we could make a lot better use of those multiple billions of dollars, and we might also ask the question why that money is going to those sectors when they seem to have a fair bit of cash as it is.

The whole issue of the carbon component is a whole
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other section that I'm sure you've already heard from others. Those kinds of factors play into the notion that the funding is available. It's a question of the political will and how you measure the impact of that funding.

As John said, if you spend a dollar and 90 percent of that comes back at you, it's not a bad investment, and it's not really a choice that we have 60 years from now to say: "Well, we couldn't figure out a way to fund it. It just didn't work. It was the SLA, or the federal government didn't want to do it."

We need to be much bolder than that, and in order to make that work, we need a solid plan that shows how this money is going to be invested — what the returns will be — and go for it. That's basically the point we wanted to make here. We're glad to take questions, but we wanted to bring that forward.

B. Stewart: Thanks very much. Yeah, that's pretty broad-ranging, and some of the terminology…. Actually, I want to ask you: what is the last one you talked about, the FRDA agreement? Federal…

J. Lawrence: …resource development agreements. There was a series of two of those back in the '80s.

B. Stewart: Okay. The other thing I wanted to ask…. You've been out on the land, and obviously, you see trees every day. Tell us what you think about the health of the timber in some of these areas that have been hit by pine beetle. Give us your perspective about the understorey and what you're seeing coming out there and the health of it post–pine beetle.

J. Lawrence: I'll tell you that from a silviculture perspective there are a lot of areas there where you would go out there and see quite a mix on the landscape. If there are 17 million — whatever the millions — 18 million, 15 million hectares impacted, there are a lot that have a mix of live and dead trees out there, but there are a lot that don't. What's most remarkable is….

Pine is generally fairly forgiving in terms of regeneration, but if you think of going out there…. These trees have died, and the seed has actually died off, and then you get a very hot fire come through there, as Bob was saying — very, very hot. Nothing really happens in some of those areas unless you go in there and aggressively replant. It's not something we're used to seeing. Typically in these areas we would see some regeneration coming back with pine.

Again, it's not in all areas. In some areas, when that fire goes through, you do see healthy regeneration, and those areas will recover over time. I think it's those one million, two million, 1.5 million, 750,000…. There's a lot of area out there where we could be very strategic. If you look at these other issues of needing to put in place strategic fuel breaks, bumps in the road of those fires, as well as restoring some watersheds that feed into the Nechako, the Fraser, whatever, and are creating these floods, then I think it's a strategic approach that's needed.

B. Routley: Because we're kind of focused on timber supply…. Obviously, your points on fire have been well received, and I think we need to do a little more looking at what you've suggested. It's certainly worthwhile.

I'd like to know your comments on potential timber supply from planting NSR, from doing commercial thinning and from stand-density improvements — about what we've heard about what they do in Sweden with more stems per hectare.

J. Lawrence: Well, if I could respond to one comment that you made, when we talk about the incidence of fire in timber supply, a lot of the mid-term and long-term timber supply is threatened by those very same fires. It's not one or the other. They're very much connected.

Some of the mid-term timber supply is coming out of those mix areas that we see in the mountain pine beetle, and that area is very susceptible to fire. We're counting on that wood, so they are very connected.

J. Lawrence: Well, we see them as part of the continuum that we're looking at here. It's not the old paradigm — right? This is a completely changed landscape, and we need to think differently about how we approach it.

It's not to say that we've got a fire issue and we've got a timber issue. That they're very linked is the point.

B. Gray: Whatever you look at as far as stocking…. I know there's discussion about higher-density stocking to solve some of the disease problems. Moving forward, we have to think more about: whatever we do, what is the level of resilience coming out of what we do?

If we just plant plantations through logging slash, we carry that hazard out well into the future. If we plant overly dense stands, we carry that crown fire hazard out into the future. Whatever we do silviculturally to try to make up the short-term thing, there is a good chance that fire is going to get it. It's either going to be resilient and withstand the effects of the fire, or we're going to lose it. We're counting on it.

J. Lawrence: Again, it's those connections. If you're going into this landscape and you're looking at doing a fuel break, that's where you could feed into the bioenergy market. You want to reduce massively the fuel loading that we typically see on some cutovers when you go in there to regenerate. So they're connected.
[ Page 677 ]

J. Betts: Can I restate our heresy a little different here? What we're really saying is that the driving impulse or the driving doctrine going forward should be restoring the landscape. It shouldn't be producing timber. Those values will flow out of having a restored landscape.

Then suddenly, wherever we choose to harvest, wherever we choose to do forest health, wherever we choose to replant, wherever we choose to thin fuels, is driven by what effect this will have at the landscape level. Will this restore resilience, which is the ability of the landscape to endure disturbance without it being totally destructive?

Of course, built into that is…. I'm talking about human habitat resilience too, considering our transmission corridors and our transportation corridors. I did mention the $10 billion of investment that's already sitting out there. We need to do something in the landscape.

I think we're mimicking a model that I've seen discussed and implemented in the U.S., where everything is guided by: how will this restore resilience? Where we choose to log…. The timber that flows out will be an outcome of restoring the landscape. That's the driving impetus. It's sometimes characterized as forest health and so on, but this is different than sustainable yield, than timber. It's a different approach.

It takes into account the fact that…. Where I live in Nelson, we're all busy washing our cars with drinking water, like most Canadians do. If we were to lose our natural watershed, I don't think the community could afford to put in the proper filtration system, and so on. There's a huge taken-for-granted resource, services that we get, and those things need to be protected as well.

We're not trying to skirt your questions. We're skewing it. We move the discussion a little bit to one side of what all of the assumptions are that we're currently hearing. I mean, I've heard lots of discussion about let's not go back to a war in the woods. I would comment that that was an easy argument to have. It was conservation versus clearcuts. Well, I think the ones we're looking at in the future will be a little more complex. I think that's what we're faced with — not that they have to be a war, necessarily. In fact, we're hoping that we're presenting some constructive ideas on how to deal with that.

H. Bains: Thank you for the presentation. My question is on the level of silviculture that you're involved in and that your association and your members are involved in. We've heard that there may not be enough silviculture as is needed, based on what's out there. I'd like to get your comment on that.

The second part of the question is that we're planting, I think the numbers were, something like 55 percent pine again, and there were some question marks on that — whether we're doing the right thing. Maybe you could comment on those two areas.

J. Lawrence: Sure, I'll take a stab at that. Right now I think that the model that we've come through, where we're looking at harvested areas being replanted, has been an effective model. I don't think that's a question here. We're not looking back and saying: "If only this person or that government had done this or that, that would solve the issue."

The reality is that we're here. It's a very different paradigm. That model is not going to treat a lot of these areas, obviously, because there's just not merchantable wood to come out of those areas. Perhaps there is in some sections, with the right incentives and the right policies. But that's different from the current model in a lot of these cases.

I would say that the level of silviculture in the current model has functioned quite well for dealing with harvested areas. This is a major paradigm shift across those affected areas. I know you've seen some of the maps to show that and driven through or flown through the areas. This is where I think, yes, the response isn't adequate.

There's a very good program called Forests for Tomorrow. It's too small for the scale of the problem that we're facing. It's not funded adequately to deal with the scope.

In terms of the species composition, you know, that's a tricky one as well. In a lot of these areas, as the climate has adjusted somewhat over recent years or changed over recent years, pine is more adapted in terms of its morphology or whatever it would be called — biology — to those sites.

I don't think it's a slam dunk that you'd say: "Well, we won't plant pine anymore." But in terms of this strategic approach that we're identifying, where you'd look at overlapping those areas, I think that is a key component. As Bob mentioned, in some of these areas we may want to put deciduous in there because of its fuel break potential and create some of that mix on the landscape.

N. Macdonald (Deputy Chair): Again, thank you for the work and the presentation.

One of the things that we've heard in the past is about the fact that if we overlay different things that we want to do and get multiple benefits, then things such as fibre that was not…. The economics weren't there. They can be there if they're combined.

I think, Bob, you've talked about the idea of perimeter forests, where we have access to fibre that we might not otherwise be able to get out of the woods, but it also provides sort of an elegant way of paying for the perimeter interface fire work that we need to do.

How far along are you with that? You've obviously spoken to a lot of communities. You've raised that with the UBCM and, I'm sure, with the ministry. So where are we with acceptance of those sorts of ideas?

B. Gray: At the community level there's a very strong acceptance, because the number of socioeconomic bene-
[ Page 678 ]
fits is huge. I know there was an announcement yesterday from Aboriginal Affairs that St. Mary's band is putting in a biomass boiler. The idea is that they would be basically fuelling that boiler off of interface fuels. That's going to save them, probably, 50 percent over their heating costs.

Cranbrook looked at something similar, where their ten largest heated users…. If they switched to a biomass boiler, they'd save half a million dollars a year, so there's a large interest in it.

One of the big issues is access to the feedstock. You know, we talk about these perimeter forests. They're typically under licence to somebody. Because of the economics of whatever they're currently using in their product line, whether it's pulp or saw timber, it makes those stands inaccessible.

One of the issues we have with co-gen and producing electricity out of wood waste is that it devalues the biomass to the point where you can't access it as standing timber. If you can integrate the removal of saw timber with the waste material into a higher-value product stream than electricity, then you can access a lot more stands. I know there are some people who don't quite agree with me on that.

The other thing is that we need better decision aids and tools. We have a great appraisal system for looking at merch timber, but we don't have an appraisal system for looking at a combination of merch and unmerch that would move into the bioenergy sector.

Lots of interest, lots of potential. I was at the International Bioenergy Conference in Prince George a couple of weeks ago. There were 450 people there looking at investment opportunities in B.C. I don't know if they came away with much of a positive assessment.

But we have to do something, and if we can do something that pays for itself, that's better than subsidizing it.

J. Rustad (Chair): Thank you. A couple of quick questions, on my side. I'm curious, because obviously silviculture is involved not just in the planting of trees but in the overall process.

We had a great presentation in Prince George from a fellow that uses sheep in terms of the brush control. I'm wondering what your thoughts are on that. I know it was practised, or tried, for a while. It currently doesn't seem to be happening much.

J. Lawrence: I think your comment is about the mix of range, again, in some of these ecosystems. We have talked about that. In some of these ecosystems the mix of range for livestock is something that could be modelled into more of the landscape approach once again, because part of the effort in the past has been to suppress fire that might have kept those as ranges.

I want to comment. I think it's a matter of how you look at things. To the shepherd…. What we call brush is protein to them. I was always impressed with that. I would love to see that industry brought back, because I think it's an overlooked potential.

The other question I have around this is area-based management, changing the way that we manage on the land base from more volume-based to more area-based. I'm sure all of you had an opportunity to work on TFLs or other types of area-based tenures versus the volume-based that we have. Have you noticed practice differences between the two? In your opinion, which would be better in terms of being able to move forward on the land base?

J. Lawrence: Our view is that the area-based tenures are the way to go. I think that'll be a challenge to implement everywhere uniformly. That's one thing we have to keep in mind with B.C. It's a very large province with a lot of diversity.

In general, with the approach that we're describing, where you're going to need to look at things on a landscape level, you're going to need to work with people who are looking at this on an area basis and not on the volume basis.

There's a whole other discussion around the issues around the volume-based tenures, but I think that's where I'll leave it.

J. Betts: I want to throw a comment in that pertains to that, because I think there has been a bit of a sea of change in terms of the licensees' attitude towards the resource, and we were lamenting the failure of our province to be able to attract convincing amounts of dollars from the federal government.

In fact, I went back and parsed through the last tranche of money. I think there was $307 million promised to western Canada. So $286 million got spent, and $170 million of that came to B.C. Of that, the most I could find that was spent on forestry was somewhere in the neighbourhood of $20 million. I remember that Quebec got $200 million, and I think New Brunswick got $35 million, and so forth.

Also, if you go back to the issue around federal dollars that were spent in the tranche prior to that, it's kind of interesting, in terms of short-term thinking, as $85 million of that first one, the community development trust fund dollars, was to transition forest workers out of the industry. Every meeting I go to today, it's: "Where the heck are we going to find new workers from?" Put that in terms of how things can change out there.

You know, I don't know where I was going with that
[ Page 679 ]
point, but I think I'll leave it and end it there.

J. Rustad (Chair): It's good. Anyway, I want to thank you very much for the presentation that you have given us and for your time for the committee.

M. Fenger: Thanks. I'm Mike Fenger, current president of Friends of Ecological Reserves, something I did after I left government.

I want to tell you a little bit, like Doug Janz did, about Friends of Ecological Reserves. We haven't been around quite as long as B.C. Wildlife Federation, but we've been around about 35 years, and we're extra eyes and ears for the parks group that now manages ecological reserves. We have wardens that go and visit the ecological reserves, and if they see something when they take some data or they make observations, then they work with parks. That has been our background.

You know, it's good that you've got this. I don't envy you your task and your time frame. We're going to hopefully make some constructive suggestions, which you'll of course include in your final report.

We do support the need for change to the status quo. We think there are many things that are not working, but we don't see harvesting of conservation areas as a solution to that. I'm going to make a number of recommendations, but that's sort of going to be a bit of a theme.

Of the scope and the focus of the consultations, it has been a bit of a concern. Every British Columbian has about a 100-hectare share in B.C., and there are 4.4 million of us. Half of those, or 2.2 million, live in the Lower Mainland. Your consultations have been with rural communities — which is understandable, but we're concerned that you're going to get that view and not be able to temper it with everyone having a 100-hectare share and needing some kind of say in it. If it's not cognizant of the fact that it's a public resource, then we're concerned about the outcome.

To try to look at that, we're going to go…. We're hoping that your committee can punt this, or suggest that a larger forum is a useful forward look at this time. This concern is about mid-term timber supply, which is a fairly narrow focus, because timber is habitat, timber is water supply, and timber is all these other things on the same piece of land.

Both the scope would be better — and we think there are problems — as well as a larger forum. I think some people have been calling for a larger forum, and maybe we are due for a larger forum. We hope you'll consider that. Maybe that's a punt for you, a possible punt. Some of us would really welcome it.

This feels very, very crammed and very tight, and we're a little bit nervous about what you'd come up with in just a few months. But I'm glad we're here.

Our concerns are about the way that the current timber supply is forecast. The concern is that we're going to end up in the same situation that we're in now if we don't include the probability of natural disturbances to bracket that single-line forecast. We've all seen those. There's a big dip, and then it kind of climbs back up.

We know that disturbances happen, so that's not a steady line. It is a forecast, but it should be bracketed by some kind of probability. I guess looking at it and listening to the panel before and the concerns about increased fire, everything seems to be on the increase. The way that we factor it in to timber supply is that we look at it afterward — can we salvage it? — operational adjustment factors, and so on.

If there was some sense…. We can play "what if." What if we had gone back 15 or 20 years and said that the probability of this wood being available to this community 30 years from now was 70 percent? That's a different message. It's a more realistic message, we believe. It's a bracket.

It could be that. In some ways, it leads to, I think, some of the overcapacity that we have had. But I'm sort of jumping around a bit.

The recommendation is that we really need to invest in research in disturbance ecology. We've heard about potential, probable fires. We've heard about needle drop. We've heard about all kinds of spruce leader weevils, not just mountain pine beetle. Those things are all going to affect us.

We really need fire, insects and disease information. Forest resiliency — how fast does it recover naturally? Where do we need to give it that silvicultural boost that the gentleman before me talked about? We really think that going back to sort of a bit more science-based approach in timber supply review would be a good thing. For those areas, fire ecologists or disturbance ecologists need to be added to the timber supply review team to do those forecasts.

That's one thing. We think that would be a real improvement. It's almost as if people expect the wood to be there. Even though it's just a determination — it's an estimate — there's still kind of a magic about that line, which is not real.

Now I'm going to talk about section 8 of the Forest Act and the determination of chief foresters. I'm glad to see them in their retirement, happy here.

First of all, I want to say that B.C. has some of the best legislation, and the mandate of the chief forester under section 8(a) we should be proud of. We would be worried if you overrode the chief forester. We would be worried if you set harvest decisions by cabinet. We don't think that's a good model. It has happened in the States with ASQ. We hope you don't recommend that way.

The reason why the chief forester and section 8 of the Forest Act is such a good act is that it's data-hungry, it's
[ Page 680 ]
analysis-informed, it's open to comment and review, and there's a rationale at the end of it. What more could you ask for? That's transparency.

We hope you keep the institution of the chief forester, notwithstanding what I said before about improvements in the forecasting to make it somewhat more, I guess, apparent to the communities that the wood may not be there.

I think the other thing about the AAC determination is there's also a need for the chief forester to, at the end of the determination, talk about the short- and long-term — this is the legislation — implications to the province of this decision. That is not just economics. That's about all those other resources, the so-called, by the timber analysts, non-timber resources. It's the riparian, the water, the biodiversity, the fish, the wildlife, the habitat, the viewscapes — all of that. What is the forecast for those? What are the expectations for those? Given all the uncertainty, what is the expectation for those? It's because it's coming from the forest and the same timber base.

That's another recommendation. Make timber supply review more robust. Recommend it become a more robust, multi-resource forecasting tool so that we can see where we're going, and not just on one thing. We're trying to solve timber supply yet not acknowledging or not understanding how it's linked to everything else. They're all linked, so it'd be nice to see how they all move. That's another thing. I think that's quite possible. It's an achievable thing, and it should certainly be done.

Following on the heels of that, I'm going to talk about the need for a chief biologist for the province to help with that forward look, what is possible. What's going to happen to the…? I mean, how do I say this? The way that Ministry of Environment currently sets fish, wildlife and harvest is a much more veiled, secretive and gestaltic kind of process than the chief forester's. I think the ministry would really be benefited if it got a piece of legislation paralleling the chief forester's that says: "This is how you do it."

You could involve fish and wildlife clubs, just the way that the industry can say: "We don't think your inventory is right." That's a much better process than people phoning up the minister and saying: "We don't like the bear kill." Well, go to the process about the data. It's a good thing, and we hope you can at least put it back on the agenda as a possible thing — and of course, habitat and numbers of wildlife. Then we can do a little forecasting on that.

Coming to the previously mentioned conservation uplifts, they've been an exceeding disappointment to us. I mean, the AAC uplifts were in the order of 33 to 104 percent for some units. I'm using some of the figures that were in front of you before, developed by Kevin Kriese. Looking at the milling capacity, you can see even with that increase there was still…. The mills could still process more wood than with a 104 percent increase. Now, I don't know why they built them so big, given that the wood, even by the forecasts, wasn't that big. There's something else going on, on why those are so big.

There has been a bit of, "Oh my goodness, we're in real trouble," but if you look at it, it looks like a single shift can be maintained in all those mills — with the exception of the mills in Prince George and Williams Lake, which would have to operate at 80 or 90 percent — even at the bottom of the mid-term supply. Maybe there's a little too much of the sky is falling. It's going to be different, but there's not going to be no timber supply. Again, there's concern about, perhaps, lack of a use of disturbance ecology and going to the bank as if the timber supply was there.

Back to what happened to the conservation uplift. It was disappointing to us, and the Forest Practices Board did find that there were big salvage units, which was expected, and bigger in-stand retention. The thing that did not happen was that there wasn't any kind of planning across the landscape together, government and industry: "If we go here, if we go there…."

In some ways — and I can't prove this — we think that a bad situation was made worse for a lot of other resources because of a lack of coordinated planning that needed to happen very, very quickly. So now we're into a situation where we have more things to restore.

I'll give you some examples. We can see that the timber is in trouble. What we don't know is how all those other things are doing, but we already know that there are 100,000 to 200,000 stream crossings with resource roads that present a potential barrier to fish — this coming from the forest investment work. They looked at 5,000 stream crossings known to have highly deficient structures, and then they looked and said that out of those, 300 to 400 really could benefit. Then they got enough money to do 50. At that rate, even to get fish back through hard pipes, it's going to take 3,000 years.

That's the current situation. I mean, I'm a real proponent of getting towards where the silviculture guys were talking about, something to do with restoration. To do that, we need, in some ways, landscape and tactical-level watershed plans again.

I'm going to move on to the Auditor General and the need for longer-term timber management objectives. We hope that your committee will support that. We know it was kind of…. It was saying: "Well, we're not in that bad shape." That was the government response. "It's actually okay. It's not as bad as you've made out." We're not sure if that's the case. If that's the case, well, let's go through the exercise, and let's see what it looks like.

The only thing I would say, on top of that, is that it should be in this larger context. Let's have the bigger discussion and the longer view for the whole thing, because all the resources are tied together.
[ Page 681 ]

You've got a very short mandate, and I'm going to try to suggest something that might be realistic with regards to looking to timber supply. We already know that that landscape turns over, because of disturbances, rather quickly. There's never a large percentage of big trees out there because of insects, fire and disease, so there's going to be a small tree landscape.

Looking to smaller trees in the future may be a way to say: "Well, if we're going to have more…." Maybe that's what the pellet and biofuel industry is thinking about.

That's the reality. It looks like it's going to get worse, with increases in disturbance as the result of climate, so maybe recalibrating ourselves to the expectations of the landscape. It isn't going to look like what it is now. Again, running some models on smaller diameters and seeing what that does, and some of the stuff that they talked about that is not currently considered in the timber-harvesting land base.

Then there's the current backlog of not satisfactorily restocked areas, which has come up a number of times. We hope that you can land on getting money back, like the forest resource development agreement, which was, for five years, $180 million and stopped in 1996. There've been some dribs and drabs since then. There is some stuff….

We think that a minimum of $200 million over another period is probably going to be able to really get something meaningful done for restoration for all resources, as well as put some people to work in these communities and build some kind of expertise again. We had people who knew a lot about watershed restoration and replanting and so on. That would be a real bonus.

On strategic land use plans. Strategic land use plans, I think, were really a good thing. They were there to increase the amount of parks and protected areas. They spun a whole bunch of other things with regards to understanding multiple resources from one land base.

The one thing I've got to say is that there was a goal to get to 12 percent in British Columbia. Every area of the mountain pine beetle zones underachieved. We have 5 percent of the Interior Douglas fir in parks and protected area, 5 percent of ponderosa pine, 6 percent of sub-boreal spruce, 6 percent of boreal white and black spruce.

These are huge biogeoclimatic zones of British Columbia that have very low levels of protected areas. We are concerned about carrying the future biodiversity in a highly industrialized landscape, especially…. The reserves are affected too, but now we're talking about going in and maybe salvaging here and there.

Looking for an increase in protection, to me, is a mid-term safety valve on some of the changes that we have very little influence over, even though we'll try to manage it.

Then there's the idea that perhaps the recent report by the Forest Practices Board about old-growth management areas…. I think it came out on June 12 and basically said there is quite a patchwork of implementation and, certainly, different approaches. We'd like to see that strengthened so that there's consistency across the piece, and consideration be given to adding old-growth management areas into the protected areas system — so on its own upgrade, not a downgrade, of conservation measures.

Again, if you go back in this — I think Doug Janz said this — and reopen those plans, involve some of the same people that were there. Maybe it means bringing back some of those monitoring committees. The government has stood down on strategic land use planning. If you're going to change land use planning….

Maybe not the same people. First Nations, if they're willing to engage, certainly should be at the table. This time they can build capacity and be part of it instead of being outside of it, if they choose. So local involvement, and with sufficient and balanced analysis on the resources, which I think should be coming out of TSR-type stuff.

Provincial practices standards. When code 1 and code 2 came along, there was a decrease in timber supply, to buy the areas that created the level playing field. We have a level playing field in British Columbia with regards to how much to conserve.

We're very worried about changing the level playing field — in other words, going into one community and saying: "This is a tragedy. We really need to find you some more wood, so we should start changing the provincial minimum to help you." We think that that is really going to be damaging across the province. This is really an appeal to keep the level playing field.

In fairness to industry, if you offer it to them, why can't we have it over here? If you start touching it in one area, I think it's going to open a Pandora's box for changing or lowering standards. That's certainly a concern for us.

Having said that, the current standards are being evaluated by government right now under the forest and range evaluation program. The results-based code is basically eight years old. Some of these landscapes move very slowly. Watersheds move very slowly. We're not sure that even the current practices are effective for the resources they're meant to retain.

Changing things. Maybe it would go the other way. Maybe there's going to be a recommendation that we should have more riparian reserves on S4s if you want fish in them. We don't know, but until that kind of analysis is there, moving standards, we think, is not prudent — not with the level of evidence that we have right now.

I've mentioned that we're changing standards also — reducing standards for conservation. In some ways, that places forest stewardship arrangements, which are…. Industry seeks these. They'll be less able to say, and B.C. will be less able to say, that we're practising sustainable forests.
[ Page 682 ]

Maybe you've heard from a number of companies. We'd be curious to know if companies are in favour of reducing environmental standards. You have more access to that than we do. We hope they are not. We hope they are seeing the benefits of a level playing field.

The same with the foresters. I understand you met with foresters earlier. Even though I am a forester, it's unclear what the bulk of the membership thinks about moving the goalposts right now for the benefit of a few communities.

With regards to area-based tenures and as a solution to short-, mid- and long-term supplies, it's really unclear that the full array of benefits and costs is known between TFLs, community forests, woodlot licences, volume-based tenures. We're in favour of getting some data to look at that.

The concern is that if there are exclusive rights in one area, how is competition, how is the return of the Crown, served by that? There are also difficulties, I think. We're going to recommend that if you go for a move to change tenure arrangements, you seek an independent panel with members selected by a number of stakeholders to look at this.

You'll need some kind of power to get information from TFL holders who hold it as proprietary if you're actually going to make comparisons that are meaningful on return to investment and how well resources are being managed in one area over another. I wouldn't just take it on opinion or lobbying.

I think you really need some information. I think the people need some information. Giving that to some kind of arm's-length, third-party, blue-ribbon panel would probably be a start to that. There's another punt for you, if you choose.

How to pay for some of the investments. I know your terms of reference don't rock the boat too much, but in some ways I think tenure is linked to revenues and looking at some of those things.

It's almost going to be impossible, in some ways, to look at, "Is the Crown getting a fair royalty in rent?" without looking at how stumpage is set right now, which opens….

How do you do that? There is the 25-cent wood. It's not clear that it was an incentive, for sure. We heard lots of things about lack of protection of second-growth forests during salvage operations. Those young trees were part of the mid-term timber supply, incentives for keeping advanced regen. Then we've also heard of — I don't have data for it — incidental logging of green trees at 25-cent wood.

Those should be concerns for the Crown with regards to: "Are the rents being realized that should be there?" Some of the stuff that we're asking for are investments in restoration and reforestation, and they're going to cost something.

Basically, I guess that means looking, too, at the role of B.C. Timber Sales in the bigger picture and the average operator concept. That's maybe more than you want to bite off, but if we went back to a larger forum, maybe that should come up. Maybe it's time for a review of that.

With regards to energy from wood, again, it's this thing. Energy is affecting a lot of B.C. Putting the B.C. Utilities Commission back in that loop to look at all those different sources and not just biofuel isolated from independent power, isolated from B.C. Hydro, isolated from everything else — maybe it would fit in there. Maybe it would be a better solution, but there seem to be a lot of things going on at once.

An expansion, looking at a B.C. energy strategy, and wood is part of that, I think we would welcome that. Again, back to perhaps a bigger forum, which is a little harder to manage the expectations of.

N. Macdonald (Deputy Chair): You talked about conservation uplift and said that there was a lack of planning. Perhaps it was within that report, but was that, in your opinion, a lack of capacity, or was it a lack of government commitment? Why did it not happen? A few people have mentioned it.

M. Fenger: Why didn't it happen? Basically, the new structure, the results-based structure, is that the industry will decide where to go and report later. In the middle of a beetle epidemic it's kind of: "Government, get out of the way. We can make these decisions."

I think government was a little bit leery to say: "Well, we've given you this new results-based tool. Now, actually, we want to get back in there and design this landscape unit, and you can log over here but not over here." I think it was a lack of willingness.

It could have maybe been done through: "We're going to put 30 metres on all this forest. There it is." Then there's something simple. That could have been done, but it wasn't done.

You get a much more elegant solution to a complex problem if you get a bunch of people and say: "Well, where are the problems? Where's the dead wood that's worth salvaging? Where should the road go? Where's the stuff that needs to be resolved?" You get a much more effective solution, but it takes more grunt work than just one of these blanket things. I think there was an unwillingness for government to do a blanket thing and no need for the industry to step up. They were busy salvaging.

J. Rustad (Chair): Mike, thank you very much for your
[ Page 683 ]
presentation and information provided to the committee.

At this point that brings to a conclusion all of the presenters to the committee for today. I want to remind presenters and anybody else that may be listening to the broadcast that you have until July 20 to be able to provide us with written information. The website for providing us that information is www.leg.bc.ca/timbercommittee.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank all of the presenters today for the information that's been provided.

Hansard Services publishes transcripts both in print and on the Internet.
Chamber debates are broadcast on television and webcast on the Internet.
Question Period podcasts are available on the Internet.

1) Association of Professional Biology	Pamela Zevit
2) Interior Lumber Manufacturers Association	Mark Semeniuk
	Jim Hackett
3) Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union	Mark Cameron
4) West Coast Environmental Law	Jessica Clogg
5) Outdoor Recreation Council of BC	Howard Harshaw
6) Forest Stewardship Council	Orrin Quinn
Ecotrust Canada	Satnam Manhas
7) Federation of BC Woodlot Associations	Mark Clark
	Brian McNaughton
8) Interfor	Ric Slaco

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
Clerks:	Craig James
	Kate Ryan-Lloyd
Committee Staff:	Morgan Lay (Committee Researcher)
	Larry Pedersen (Technical Advisor)
	Jim Snetsinger (Technical Advisor)
Attending Government Staff:	Susanna Laaksonen-Craig (Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations)
	Dave Peterson (Chief Forester, Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations)

Witnesses:	John Betts (Executive Director, Western Silvicultural Contractors Association)
	Mark Cameron (Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada)
	Mark Clark (President, Federation of B.C. Woodlot Associations)
	Jessica Clogg (Executive Director, West Coast Environmental Law Association)
	Mike Fenger (President, Friends of Ecological Reserves)
	Bob Gray (Western Silvicultural Contractors Association)
	Jim Hackett (President, Interior Lumber Manufacturers Association)
	Howard Harshaw (Chair, Outdoor Recreation Council of B.C.)
	Doug Janz (B.C. Wildlife Federation)
	John Lawrence (President, Western Silvicultural Contractors Association)
	Brian McNaughton (Federation of B.C. Woodlot Associations)
	Satnam Manhas (Ecotrust Canada)
	Orrin Quinn (Forest Stewardship Council)
	Mark Semeniuk (Interior Lumber Manufacturers Association)
	Ric Slaco (Vice-President, International Forest Products Ltd.)
	Pamela Zevit (Association of Professional Biology)

9) BC Wildlife Federation	Doug Janz
10) Western Silvicultural Contractors' Association	John Lawrence
	John Betts
	Bob Gray
11) Friends of Ecological Reserves	Mike Fenger

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS (Hansard)

SPECIAL COMMITTEE ON TIMBER SUPPLY

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SPECIAL COMMITTEE ON
TIMBER SUPPLY