STANDING COMMITTEE ON RESOURCES
Mr. James DeWolfe
MR. CHAIRMAN: Ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased that everyone could make it. There are still a couple of members missing and as they come in we will introduce them. We have with us today Eric Georgeson. Eric is a long-time colleague and friend from Natural Resources. Eric is an entomologist from the entomology section in Shubenacadie; Nancy MacInnis-Leek, Director of Forestry; Mr. Ed MacAulay is no stranger to this committee, Executive Director of Renewable Resources; and Walter Fanning who is Manager of Forest Protection out of Truro. Walter is - I think I will mention - one of the newest inductees in the Nova Scotia Sports Hall of Fame. I think that is quite an honour too. I don't know if your colleagues realize what a sports personality you really are.
At any rate, we will save that conversation for another day. We will move on. We will leave that to questions and we will start with the most important member of our caucus, from Preston, David Hendsbee.
[The committee members introduced themselves.]
MR. CHAIRMAN: As I said, there will be a couple more members probably joining us so we will move on.
MR. BRIAN BOUDREAU: Just on a point, Mr. Chairman, if I may, I bring apologies on behalf of my colleague, the member for Victoria, who is very interested in this particular topic but he is tied up with a prior commitment in his constituency today and unable to attend but he sends his regrets. That is, of course, MLA Kennie MacAskill.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you very much. I am sure that is noted. So without further ado, our star performer today, Eric. The reason you are here emanated from the discussion we have had with the Christmas tree growers and so on. It sparked an intense conversation around this table and we thought it would be most interesting to hear your thoughts and predictions for the coming year and perhaps bring us up to speed on the type of work your department does and indeed what you do. So without further ado, would you please start the presentation. Would you like to go through your presentation before we ask any questions or do you care to be interrupted? Normally what we have, Eric, is a presentation and then we usually have a generous time for questions.
MR. ERIC GEORGESON: Normally I am very freewheeling, those of you who witnessed my other talks. This is going to be slightly more structured, so if I could give the presentation because I was given such a small time frame and had to jam so much in. I am sure there will be questions afterwards.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Well, you can expand upon some of those items during the question period, I am sure.
MR. GEORGESON: Thank you very much.
MR. CHAIRMAN: So we will turn the floor over to you, Eric, and we are looking forward to hearing your presentation.
MR. GEORGESON: Mr. Chairman, and members of the standing committee, thank you very much for having me here - I think.
Before I get started, I read last night - I must get another hobby but - I was reading entomology material, and an English professor has estimated that the number of insects in the world at any given moment as being in the area of 1018. To put it another way, that would be 10 followed by 18 zeros. So it is a million billion insects at any given moment on the planet. Since there are only 4 billion humans, we have to depend heavily on the element of surprise to survive. What I am going to do is talk a little bit about one of these elements of surprise.
I am the provincial entomologist and I lead the Integrated Pest Management Section within the Department of - and I have to use this thing. This is all new technology because usually I just use overheads. Is it the left button? Yes. That is Shubenacadie, the x on the map. We have a little technical glitch and apparently the pictures don't show up.
Essentially, it is forest protection, is the group. Yes, if you have those things you see where we are at or where we are coming to. I think our graphs are down too, Walter.
MR. WALTER FANNING: Yes, we made two different backups and a copy and for some reason it is not pulling it up there.
MR. GEORGESON: Do you want me to go to overheads? Okay, good. Hopefully I can match this all together. Sorry about the confusion.
The structure, as you see, is a typical pyramid structure. Our group is under Forest Protection, which is further under the Forestry Division and under the Renewable Resources Branch. Our next overhead just gives a breakdown of the group that I run and it is Integrated Pest Management and Bob Guscott is my Chief Technician and I have series of skilled people under me. They are skilled in survey work. In Christmas tree work is Keith Moore. We were very fortunate to get him transferred over to us and 50 per cent of his time is spent on Christmas tree work but we don't work in isolation. We work as a unit. We have one guy who is really good at identification, Jeff Ogden, so he handles a lot of the insect identification. Others are exceptionally good at collecting samples out in the field. So we work as a careful unit within that organization.
Now if you take everything we do and we compress it down into a single statement - which is not an easy thing to do - it comes out to provide accurate information on the health of Nova Scotia forests and give information and management options to the forest stakeholders. How we do that is through - I guess the next that came up was a picture and it essentially said, this is what we want to avoid. If this was in colour, as far as you can see is red. This was during the whitemarked tussock outbreak. That was the last massive outbreak that we had. It sprung up quickly. It took out a wide area. I think at one time we had extreme defoliation, somewhere in the area of 500 to 600 square kilometres, literally overnight, disappeared.
MR. DAVID HENDSBEE: Where did this occur at?
MR. GEORGESON: This occurred in northern Nova Scotia, probably in Colchester, but Cumberland, Pictou and Antigonish were particularly severely hit. It is a native insect but that gives you an idea of the speed that these things can develop, the amount of damage that can be consumed. In Cape Breton, we are still dealing with the aftermath of the spruce budworm. That is another example of a native insect that suddenly took off and sky-rocketed.
Now we do our work through a number of priorities. First off, and the key, and I have to stress this - this is the key - monitor, monitor, monitor. You have to monitor forest pests and develop better detection methods. It is an endless game. We call it a game in entomology. It is an endless job. This is the cornerstone of what we do. I can't stress how important it is to have good intelligence on what that insect population is doing out there. Is it going up? Is it remaining the same? Is it starting to drop? We have to know that basic data. This is done by gathering information systematically and consistently through annual surveys that we do.
The second thing, analyze forest health conditions using field and survey data. That is if you go out there and get a bunch of numbers, you have to do something with it. After all, what are statistics? Just a bunch of numbers looking for an argument, right? So you have to
take that and you have to digest it down into something that you can put out that the stakeholders can use.
The third one - it is hard to believe that I have had computers since the TRAS80 came out. (Interruption) Yes, I know. Any company who would put a clear button right by the enter bar, you have to wonder. (Laughter)
The third priority is provide accurate information and education to stakeholders in a timely manner. We do this through meeting with associations, groups and just providing timely information. We do this through talks, reports, newsletters, display and we hope, soon, through the departmental web site, to have a more - we are on there now - but to have a more constructive web site with more information that the clients can use. As an example, in our newsletter, we have written over 60 insect focus articles which can be easily adapted to web use. So that is the start.
The fourth one, develop and maintain good management options and systems. This is the key to IPM. You can do all these other things but if you can't do that, then it all comes to naught. We are continually developing integrated pest management methods that can be used by forest stakeholders for early intervention. Get there before it is a crisis. Prevention is strongly preferred to direct suppression which is really, in IPM, the last resort. That is the last thing you go in for.
[9:15 a.m.]
Now, integrated pest management, the definition of, there are about as many different definitions out there as you have hand calculators. It runs from a short sentence to about two pages, but in essence they all have four main points in common: one, survey or check for problems, monitor, monitor, monitor; two, have a good selection of tools in your toolbox to use when the problem develops; three, try to prevent problems from happening again; and four, keep looking for and building better tools and better methods for prevention.
I am going to use an entomologist's allegory to explain IPM, and I'm going to talk to you as entomologists talk to each other, we simplify things, believe it or not. The one I'm going to use is flies in the kitchen. This kind of shows how it all comes together. You go home, your significant other meets you at the door, informs you that there are flies in the kitchen and there are going to be no more meals prepared in the house until they are gone. First you have to find out if the kitchen is the only room with flies in it, and if it is where are they in that room. So, you are monitoring.
Second, upon finding out that yes, the kitchen is the only room with flies in it, you have to next determine what to do. So, you have selection. You can: one, use fly paper, and that's a physical control; two, use a flyswatter, and that's a mechanical control, because you
have to swing the darn thing; or three, a fly-eating cat, that's a biological control; and the final one is use Raid, a chemical control. So you have all these options open to you.
You go in there, you control the fly problem, but that's only part of it. You have the third thing, once the flies are taken care of you have to ensure they don't come back. In other words, fix the hole in the screen in the kitchen window. Meanwhile, the fourth is never forget the flies got in your kitchen once, always be looking for new ways to control them if they do and new ways to prevent them from getting in. In forestry it works the same, a little bit more complex but basically it works the same.
The big change over the last decade has been the amount of IPM work being done by the Nova Scotia Department of Natural Resources. The elimination of this service and a lot of pest service by the federal government and their Department of Natural Resources or the Canadian Forestry Service has left the province to develop its own critical resources, staff at Shubie. We were able to assemble and build a monitoring system, we were able to build an identification system for the province, and we have started to build IPM systems for the province, to be used.
The good news is we do not work in a vacuum. You can't, not anymore. Globalization doesn't permit you to. We depend on a number of groups to provide us with assistance and with help as we accomplish these priorities I listed before. Within our own department we have province-wide pest detection officer systems, these are technicians trained in the field, we have 22 of them, and they can do basic identification out there. If somebody brings a forest tent caterpillar in and wants to know what it is, they can tell them. They don't need to contact us at the lab. If they bring something in they don't recognize, they have the protocol or procedure that they can ship that to us, we can identify it the day we get it and get word back to them with options, if necessary. The other thing, too, is if they go out in the woods and they find about 30 or 40 hectares suddenly defoliated and a bunch of insects they can't identify, and even if they can identify it, we want to know.
We also work closely with the federal government. We work closely with the Canadian Forestry Service, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, Biosystematics in Ottawa for identification of stuff we can't identify. We have a whole network of people. If we can't identify something at the lab, we have other people we can ship it to. It all comes down to developing good quality monitoring systems so that the best information on forest health can be given to all forest stakeholders, be they small woodlot owners or large industry. That's always been the way I've worked or tried to work.
The other critical point is developing good IMP methods to give to these stakeholders. We try to be proactive in forest pest problems, rather than reactive. We try, gosh knows we try, but this can be challenging with over 650 different known pests that cause significant damage in the forests. However, while we have concern for any damage in forestry we concentrate the majority of resources on the 10 or 20 that cause the most damage. We're always trying to watch them and what they're doing out there.
Our Maritime weather can cause additional complications because of its impact on insect populations. Colder winters and damp summers can stress the insect population. For several winters now we've had warmer than usual conditions, and this has allowed for better survival than normal. With little or no frost in the ground, that works to kill and reduce some population. Despite the fact that we had heavy snowfall, the melt has occurred earlier, there has been little frost in the ground and there has been a lot of run-offs. Remember what happened last year, we had a lot of snow, more or less what we've had this year so far, it melted quickly, rained for two wonderful months, April and May, when we were trying to do field work, and then it didn't rain again, after I planted my garden, until sometime in September. That's pretty well how it went across the province. Insects love this.
Examples of insects in Nova Scotia, and I'm only going to touch on a few. The Eastern spruce beetle is causing severe damage to the white spruce in our province. We have over a million acres of white spruce, I won't go into a lot of details on that, but over 40 per cent of them are now affected with this beetle, and it has just continued to climb at a higher rate, increase, basically because of the warmer winters.
The balsam wooly adelgid, this is something that the Christmas tree guys are concerned a lot about, and rightly so. That's an old introduced insect, old in the sense that it was introduced back in 1890's. It's the most serious threat to the Christmas tree industry at the moment. We have helped develop an IPM system and still continue to develop that system. When I get within five minutes, somebody show me a hand.
The gypsy moth population is another introduced insect in the province. It's starting to build in the western end, especially around the upper Valley area, that's Annapolis through to Kentville and down around the Bridgewater area. This is the amazing thing about this that I've found, we do studies on this population a lot, normally the winter survival is only 40 per cent. Only 40 per cent of the eggs over-winter. Last year we had 96 per cent survival, and that really makes me nervous. It's been reflected by increased larval and defoliation starting to show up in those areas.
MR. HOWARD EPSTEIN: Was that comment just about the balsam wooly adelgid or was that about everything else, the survival rate?
MR. GEORGESON: That's just for the gypsy moth. The gypsy moth still hasn't spread out of its quarantine zone, that's the western end. But if that population builds up right at the border of the quarantine zone, it's quite possible they could start moving towards the east again. It's really critical to survey more for that at this time. We have several series of surveys out there now, but we may have to increase these to try to determine what this thing is doing now. It's starting to be on the move. It's been tried a couple of times to quarantine the whole province for gypsy moth, but CFIA still doesn't have the justification to do it yet, but if it starts to spread they may have that justification.
The spruce budworm is still off the radar screen. We're still not finding a lot of it, but the bad news is western and central Canada's population is starting to build again, we are starting to pick up increased populations in New Brunswick, it is going the exact same way as it did before. We have to keep monitoring for that one, even though we seem to get very little in return, but even negatives are important information to us.
[9:30 a.m.]
Other insects being monitored: hemlock looper, balsam fir sawfly, and whitemarked tussock moth. But it is the introduced insects, the foreign and exotic ones that are really causing us concern right now, especially with the one in the park, the brown spruce longhorn beetle.
The federal agency, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, is the one that looks after that. They have the legislation and they have the resources. They are working very hard to ensure that that is eradicated. It came in and like all insects in any kind of bio-invasion it has to go through three stages. The first is introduction and I think we should have one of our pages here, no we don't, but I am going to talk to you about it.
There are three stages and the first one is introduction. That means the process of that insect arriving in a geographic area and adapting - it doesn't matter how it gets there, it just arrives.
Establishment, you have to keep in mind the majority of what comes doesn't make it, it dies but an introduced organism becomes established. This is where the brown spruce longhorn beetle is right now, in the establishment phase, it is becoming established. Once it is able to reproduce and maintain a population that survives year to year, then it is here but we still have the opportunity to annihilate it, I shouldn't say annihilate it but to eradicate it, to get it out of the province. Unfortunately, we are the only place in North America with it. There is a lot of attention being paid to the province from outside agencies, especially the USDA Forestry Service. That is why we are co-operating as a department so close with what the federal people are doing.
The third stage is the spread stage. It's very seldom eradication works when it hits the spread stage. If this insect gets into our main forest areas of red spruce, then we are in a lot of trouble. Let's hope it can be stopped before it does. A rule of thumb is simply this, only 35 pest insects introduced will become a problem or become established, 35 out of 1,000, they worked this out.
The good news is the BSLB, the brown spruce longhorn beetle, is still in the establishment stage and headway is being made. The Canadian Forestry Service is making a lot, we have a trap now, we found out a lot of stuff that we can use, or they can use against it, we only assist. The process is ongoing but the province plays an important role on that task force, to direct what they do and to encourage them to keep going on it. I can't stress how important it is to fight this thing. If this thing gets in our forests there is going to be a quarantine, there has to be a quarantine to protect the rest of North America.
In conclusion, with all of the native and non-native pest threats to our forest resources, we must be proactive. It is more critical now than ever before to gather good intelligence on what those insect populations are doing and develop and adopt sound IPM systems and methods. This is not only to protect our own resource but also to show the global community that we are willing to do so, so that we can prevent the spread of pests outside our area.
Basically that is it and I compressed an awful lot of stuff in there so if you have questions, I will do my best to answer.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you very much for your overview and as I indicated, we hope you will expand on some of those items you covered as we go through the question period. Mr. Barnet.
MR. BARRY BARNET: First of all, yesterday I had the opportunity to meet with a woodlot owner and somebody who is involved with the harvesting of trees and that business. He was still concerned about the brown spruce longhorn beetle and he indicated to me that it seems as if it may have come off the radar screen from a media perspective but there are still a lot of issues out there. He has had tracts of land that have been quarantined in and around the Halifax area and he is one of these old-thinkers that really, he's more concerned about the value of his particular piece of land than whether or not this is a legitimate threat to other areas.
I guess from a provincial perspective, do you believe or do we believe that we actually have a handle on this to a point where we are not going to have any sanctions from external jurisdictions with respect to our lumber industry?
MR. GEORGESON: Yes, right now we do - you mean like the USDA imposing a quarantine?
MR. BARNET: Right.
MR. GEORGESON: Right now the USDA is quite pleased with the effort being undertaken by the federal and provincial governments. There has been no indication, at least that I'm aware of as Provincial Entomologist, that there has been any discussion of quarantining all of Nova Scotia.
MR. BARNET: With respect to the origin of the brown spruce longhorn beetle, how it actually arrived in Halifax, there is a great deal of belief that it came because of our connection to the port and through some sort of shipping methods. It is my understanding that other port cities have faced similar types of things; New York, for example, with the Japanese longhorn beetle. Why is it that apparently 10 years after this thing has arrived that we finally discover it and is there something we can learn from other jurisdictions, like New York, which has - as I understand it - developed a fairly significant program to eradicate their particular pests?
MR. GEORGESON: Yes, it did arrive from a shipping container and other ports suffer that same dilemma. You have to keep in mind when some of that dunnage comes through, I remember reading a report where there had been one bolt of logs approximately two feet long in Vancouver, B.C. and they took that and reared all of the insects out it, it came from Asia, and they got something like 1,500 specimens out of 13 species, all 13 of which were not native to this country. So you can get quite a load in a small amount of dunnage.
It was interesting, I talked to those entomologists involved because they came up to visit us to see if they could learn anything from us in fighting the Asian longhorn beetle back in New York. They are having a very difficult time with it but they are working hard at it as well. New York and Chicago are the two cities affected. Did I answer your question completely or did I miss something?
MR. BARNET: Yes. My second question, if I can, Mr. Chairman. We had the Christmas tree growers in here before Christmas and one of the concerns they expressed to us was the fact that they are somewhat affected by the quarantine zone of the gypsy moth and they were concerned about the possibility of that quarantine being extended to other areas and how that would affect their industry. You kind of touched on it but if you could expand on their concern, whether you are aware of it and whether or not there is something we are doing to address that?
MR. GEORGESON: Yes, we are very much aware of it. Periodically there are meetings with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, CFIA. There is always the possibility that it can be expanded. They wanted to see if I wanted it last year. It came down from Ottawa and said, this is it, it's going to be expanded, the whole province is going to be
expanded; we are going to quarantine Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec and Ontario. We were the first province they decided to talk to about the whole thing.
We simply reminded them - and I must admit, the CFIA staff in Nova Scotia, as in Atlantic Canada, is very supportive of us - that they had no justification to expand it. It's still within the original area, the western end. It hasn't spread to the eastern end. We find moths but they are windblown. We do searches. We cannot find other life forms.
They have no proof, but they do have the legislation. Somebody in Ottawa, without much ado, could say all of eastern Canada is now quarantined. Still, they do their best to play within the rules that they set down. The rules are that if you don't find the complete life cycle, how can you quarantine an area? If they are outside the western quarantine zone, the gypsy moth, right now, looks okay. I have not found any other life forms in my surveys. I survey for it in a non-quarantine zone.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Dooks.
MR. WILLIAM DOOKS: Thank you for coming in today. I certainly enjoyed your presentation. It's important to know that there is someone out there watching our forests for many stakeholders, the industry, and also those who enjoy the forests for recreation and other activities. I was just curious. How long has the department been monitoring this type of activity? How long have we been involved in watching insects and knowing their effect on the forest?
MR. GEORGESON: Well, systematically watching them, as long as there has been a department there have been interests in it. We, at that time, the 1920's, 1930's, 1940's, it depended on federal guys coming down. It used to be kind of classical. I mean, they would send an entomologist down, he would whiz through the province for a couple of weeks and he'd write about a 20-page report on the entomology - you know, the insect condition, the pest conditions in Nova Scotia - but that doesn't work now. What we did, systematically, we got systematic in about the 1980's. We actually started to build up facilities and labs, and train people.
MR. DOOKS: I was just wondering about the cycle of insects and their effect on forests. Do you have any data supporting that this is a cycle we go through, we have our forests and a number of insects come in and destroy a certain amount, and then that fades out for whatever reason, and new growth takes over?
I wonder, was the great plan to have a natural cull of the forests? Notwithstanding the comment that we have brought in foreign species or foreign insects, but would you have any database that the spruce budworm was actually here 250 years ago, they did their thing, disappeared and then regenerated and came back again? Is it a natural cycle, I guess, for insect infestation?
MR. GEORGESON: I think in New Brunswick they have data by looking at tree growth rings. I think they go back about 300 years, that they could follow the cycle.
MR. DOOKS: So there is a bit of a cycle, a natural type of thing?
MR. GEORGESON: Oh, yes. Native insects usually go in cycles. The budworm usually takes mature balsam fir. When they run out of balsam fir, then they go onto spruce. That's just a natural cycle. The problem is, when you get an introduced insect, like the beech scale - take the beech scale. It came in, what, on Queen Victoria's birthday or something, or anniversary, and they brought some beech into the park here in Public Gardens and the scale spread from there. At one time, back in the 1900's, the inventory of hardwoods up in Cape Breton was that 65 per cent of it was made up of beech trees. After the scale got done, less than 1 per cent presently stands.
Often, nature doesn't look after the problem. Native insects, there are checks and balances built in the population. You've got the whitemarked tussock moth. What a catastrophe that was. It is what I call a skyrocket type. It skyrockets up. If you have to take a management course of action, you try to protect as much of the critical areas as possible because you know the thing is going to collapse.
MR. DOOKS: What about the maturity of a certain tree? Would an insect have no respect of an age of a tree? They just happen to fly or crawl on one, whatever the case may be, and chew it up and destroy it, or do they go after mature or the very young? Do they have a preference of . . .
MR. GEORGESON: Usually, on a normal population level, an insect will go after an easier target, but when you get high numbers, the insect will start attacking healthy trees.
Take the spruce beetle. The spruce beetle is a good example; it's a native one. Normally, it's found on mature damaged white spruce. A lot of winters, a little frost, the hardwood trees lose their leaves and you get the fall winds and the spring winds, so you get a lot of trees leaning. These are weakened trees and the spruce beetle really builds up population on these. Then they head off and start attacking ones that are still standing and healthy, which is unfortunate.
MR. DOOKS: I certainly understand that insects play a very important part in our whole life, the food chain issue but when you're notified that we have a situation that's out of control, do you consider spraying - I guess you do. What are your thoughts on spraying? Does it kill that specific insect or others? How does that affect the whole food chain cycle on, we'll say, 500 hectares of mature forest. I'm not against it for that reason, but I'm just trying to find a perspective. If all of a sudden we have a large area where we have an insect that we have to control, liking it or not liking the process in which we destroy it, we spray that area.
That insect would die but many others die as well. What about the effect on animals, that whole thought, through your thought process?
MR. GEORGESON: Gee, that's my whole training right there. (Laughter) Let's take the spruce budworm. If we have 500 hectares heavily infested with spruce budworm, we go in and spray. This province only uses BTK. It is a biological bacteria. It affects lepidopterans butterflies and moths - and that's the group that this one belongs to. But it only affects them when they are in a certain stage, the caterpillar stage. We spray and it knocks them down.
Now, how do I know this isn't affecting anything else? It's because a lot of studies have been done, a lot of independent studies by universities. The BTK, the element in the bacteria spray just doesn't work on mammals. Their digestive system is different. It's like a crystal in there. The insect digestive system will cleave it one way and it becomes toxic to them. Our digestive system will cleave it and it just passes through. It's basically a soil bacteria, so anybody who has a garden is exposed to it at one time or another.
MR. DOOKS: The spruce budworm, how did we stop it? How did it stop? Through the spraying techniques, or did it just stop on its own?
MR. GEORGESON: No. In this province, all the spraying technique did was hold areas for stakeholders. The budworm was taken out in Cape Breton, basically, with the loss of food supply; 92 per cent of the balsam fir were killed. In the mainland, it had more of a disease factor that took it out.
MR. DOOKS: That's right. I remember it well. I was living in the Highlands at the time of the spruce budworm and I can remember waking up in the morning and seeing the cobwebs, or whatever. Is that what you call them? What do you call that? The strings.
MR. GEORGESON: Yes, from the tree to the car, to your cottage, to the shore, whatever. It was unbelievable.
MR. DOOKS: There are a number of questions but I am limited to questions I can ask. I'm just going to switch a little bit. Killer bees. We hear a lot about it on TV and we read about it a little bit. Where are we with that? Are we studying the issue? Are you looking at that? Is it because we're coastal they won't come? I mean, they're encroaching up the Americas, gradually. What are we doing for prevention of the killer bees?
MR. GEORGESON: That does fall within the federal realm but I have been in contact with the entomologist. Well, we all talk together. It's still spreading down in the U.S., but it's spreading slowly and the genetic end of it seems to be weakening some.
MR. DOOKS: Well, possibly, could we receive a shipment of something from some foreign land and the killer bee could be in that shipment and have the same problem? I mean, do we anticipate it coming or is it not going to happen?
MR. GEORGESON: Well, the Agriculture Department had a bee entomologist mainly concerned with that. I really didn't have much to do with it. I used to communicate with him but there have been some changes there. I'm not sure where we stand in the province on that. That is out of my realm. (Laughter)
[9:45 a.m.]
MR. DOOKS: I didn't expect an answer. That is kind of out of the hat.
Mr. Chairman, my time is taken up and I do thank you for your presentation. I respect, very much, your work and keeping our forests safe and clean.
MR. GEORGESON: I am trying.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you, Mr. Dooks. We will, no doubt, have time to come back to you. We have low numbers today. Mr. Epstein, I think you are next on the list. I turn the floor over to you.
MR. EPSTEIN: Mr. Georgeson, can you help me understand the division of responsibilities between the federal and the provincial departments that have jurisdiction to deal with pests in the forests?
MR. GEORGESON: If it is an introduced pest, then the federal government has the overall control of that. The situation arises when they determine that the insect is well and truly established in a province. At that point, they will drop it over onto the province and say, okay, it is established, we are going to put a quarantine zone around it and it is yours at that point.
As a native insect pest, it basically falls on the province. Any native, that is the budworm, spruce beetle, hemlock looper. The gypsy moth, as you know, they have done a big quarantine there. Basically, that has dropped down to the province to monitor that area. Although, they still provide traps to monitor outside the area.
MR. EPSTEIN: So just to take the example of the gypsy moth. You earlier described it as being an introduced species, at some point the federal government, through the CFIA or predecessor agency, would have had responsibility for dealing with that. Is that right?
MR. GEORGESON: That is correct. That was a planned quarantine back then.
MR. EPSTEIN: Yes, when was the back then? What years are we talking about?
MR. GEORGESON: That would be back in early 1980's, probably 1980, 1981.
MR. EPSTEIN: So at some point the federal government decided that, although they have originally been a foreign pest to us, it is no longer within their jurisdiction. It had been established and was, therefore, a provincial responsibility? Is that basically what happened?
MR. GEORGESON: Yes, basically. It falls in that quasi-area where you have part of the province quarantined and it falls into a provincial zone, but the rest is unquarantined. Technically, if I find a population of, say, gypsy moth around New Glasgow, then I would be able to get support from CFIA to eradicate, not I, but they would go in and try to eradicate that population around New Glasgow.
MR. EPSTEIN: I'm not sure I understand that. Why is that? At some point, isn't there a determination that the species becomes established in North America and Canada?
MR. GEORGESON: Well, that is what saves us. It is kind of a grey area. Normally, the definition is, once the insect can make a complete life cycle, unaided - that was the original definition. But they found, with the Asian longhorn, with the brown spruce beetle, with the European spruce beetle, these exotics, that that definition did not serve the purpose that they wanted it to. They are revising that now. That is why I sound vague on it, because honestly, I don't know where they stand on it right now.
MR. EPSTEIN: There is no clear definition? I'm sorry, perhaps there is another answer here.
MR. MACAULAY: I don't want to interrupt.
MR. EPSTEIN: Whatever help you can give us.
MR. MACAULAY: One way to consider it is if they feel there is an opportunity to eradicate the insect, then they maintain their vigilance and they look after the program, such as the spruce longhorn beetle.
MR. GEORGESON: That's right.
MR. MACAULAY: Once it is well-established and it has got a resident population, then their role switches, not to eradication but to watching the insect from a quarantine point of view, so watching it from its spread and making sure that it doesn't encourage the spread further into the province or the country. Is that more or less right?
MR. GEORGESON: That is basically it, yes.
MR. EPSTEIN: So it is a fairly flexible definition and it is a matter that is entirely in the CIFA's hands, is it?
MR. GEORGESON: Basically.
MR. MACAULAY: Their legislation though is legislation that would control quarantine because it is an international legislation. The quarantine works both ways. It works for quarantine pests or shipments coming into the province and it quarantines domestic movement of products for the insect as well, so it is federal legislation, not provincially.
MR. EPSTEIN: But it is only triggered by insects that they regard as having been introduced in the first place?
MR. GEORGESON: That is correct.
MR. EPSTEIN: That is right, okay. This actually gets me to another question that I was wondering about. The federal government has a fairly elaborate legislative scheme to deal with it. There is the Pest Control Act, I think, and they have all their regulations under it and they have the international conventions that they have signed onto and so on, so there is quite an elaborate scheme. I am wondering about the state of our legislation because it is not clear to me what our legislative tools are to deal with the pests that come within your jurisdiction. Most of what you have described has been monitoring, which is keeping an eye on things and gathering information and talking to people and dissemination. Those aren't legislative tools, those aren't quarantine tools, for example, on a local basis, those aren't eradication tools on a local basis. Am I wrong? Do you have legislative tools that you can use?
MR. MACAULAY: I am not going to make a comment on whether we have all the legislative requirements we need but, certainly, under the Forests Act there is an onus on the minister to ensure a healthy forest environment, it gives him legislative responsibility for protecting the forests.
MR. EPSTEIN: In fact, as I read the Forests Act in Section 21(1), "The Minister shall undertake all measures which the Minister determines to be reasonable to provide for effective protection of the forests whether Crown lands, other lands vested in the Crown or privately owned land from various injurious agents, including fires, insects and diseases." But as I read it, that's it, there don't seem to be regulations that implement that in any detailed form. There is nothing to correspond with the Pest Control Act at the federal level, which has these very elaborate series of regulations, talking about inspectors and their powers and the powers of notice and the process of analysis and the posting of signs on property and so on. That is completely absent from the provincial regime, is that right?
MR. MACAULAY: Yes, for a reason, because those powers are federal in jurisdiction . . .
MR. EPSTEIN: But the federal powers are with respect to non-native insects. Surely we have . . .
MR. MACAULAY: The federal powers are also there on pest control products in any of the licensing of any product we would use on an insect population, so . . .
MR. EPSTEIN: But that's the licensing of insecticides. I am talking about what you do once you discover the pest in place.
MR. MACAULAY: As far as we're concerned in the province, we see our role as monitoring for the insect population, we really don't need regulation to do that. We have the right in the Forests Act to enter upon property to do certain things, one of which would be to sample and monitor. We find that for the role we have in analyzing insect populations, providing information, the four points that Eric has pointed out, there is really not a regulation we are missing or that we would need at this point, that we're aware of.
MR. EPSTEIN: So if you were interested in doing say, aerial spraying of BTK over a wide area, would you need legislative authority? What legislative authority would you point to if you did?
MR. MACAULAY: I'm uncomfortable because I don't have the command of the legislation that I would like to have had before this discussion but it is our understanding that we have the legislative requirement in the Forests Act to allow us to do that. We have had several examples of that in the past where we have.
MR. EPSTEIN: I know it has been done, I guess it just wasn't clear to me, as I look at the legislation today, thinking about it, what the . . .
MR. MACAULAY: It has always been our view that the legislation in the Forests Act, the wording in the Forests Act, and the wording in the old Lands and Forests Act previous to that, gave the minister that kind of responsibility and gave him the ability to actually carry out those programs.
MR. EPSTEIN: I have to say, as I read it, probably the minister could pass regulations if a decision were made to move in that direction but, in the absence of regulations, it is not clear to me - implementing what the Act talks about - that the wording would authorize it. I guess that is a separate thing but I am right, there is no parallel set of regulations that I am missing that looks like the federal regulations?
MR. MACAULAY: No.
MR. EPSTEIN: Okay.
MS. NANCY MCINNIS-LEEK: Really the federal regulations are triggered by the need to address the national trade rules and international trade assurances, more than management of the insect population. Our focus is really on management of the population itself and trying to ensure that we know what's going on and establish ways to reduce the impact of insects. Whereas, on the federal side it is very focused on controlling a boundary of insects which may affect international trade of products in particular. So they are coming at it from a much different angle and therefore need much different controls than we do, in order to accomplish their particular priorities.
MR. EPSTEIN: Well, they've promised their trade partners that they would have such rules in place.
MS. MCINNIS-LEEK: Those are the types of rules that make it possible for international trade to continue and reduce some of the impacts on our own trade of lumber and such. Those are the types of environments they work in, whereas we are working in a somewhat different environment, as I've explained, while we are managing the forests, not managing the international trade aspects or managing those aspects. We are working on the biological side of the forest management side, therefore we don't need the same type of legislative tools to do that. We work a lot of different types of programs, such as forest management programs and such, which address those issues. We haven't, as yet, required any legislative authority beyond what we have, in order to manage the issues that we have before us at the provincial level.
MR. EPSTEIN: So is your assumption that if you discover some problem and you notify woodlot owners and holders of leases, that they'll take the appropriate action? Is that what you are saying?
MS. MCINNIS-LEEK: Many of them want to take appropriate action. What we do is advise them on what that appropriate action is. In most cases they have their own authority and the rules for using different types of tools to accomplish that. There isn't a reluctance to do that in most cases and I don't think it is a net around where you want to get into forcing people to take particular controls. We haven't needed to at this point and in fact, often when you do have an issue, the element often swings the other way, where people want us to take more dramatic controls, as we have seen with some of the insects when they found it affected them directly. It is a balancing act in terms of what's appropriate, versus what's available.
MR. EPSTEIN: So you're not anticipating circumstances in which you might want to assert a provincial quarantine? That is assert out of the provincial department some kind of internal quarantine?
MS. MCINNIS-LEEK: Well, a quarantine basically - and this is Eric's area - affects the movement of products that might transfer an insect from one area to another. I guess in our case, nature does more of that than do people. You're only controlling people, you can't
control nature, we are dealing with a small province. As Eric explained, the wind can blow most of these insect populations much farther than products can.
MR. EPSTEIN: And they fly.
MS. MCINNIS-LEEK: And they fly and they get along on their own. Legislation does not help you in that realm.
MR. EPSTEIN: On the question of cycles, getting back to Mr. Georgeson, I'm wondering which of the insects you're anticipating might be next asserting itself as a pest. Here I'm thinking about native insects.
MR. GEORGESON: One of the great things about being a provincial entomologist, when you gaze into a crystal ball you have to learn to eat glass a lot. Based on the survey data - we just finished up a major survey in our labs, it has taken us about four months to gather all the data together and we have taken that and looking at it - right now it is possible that the balsam fir sawfly is continuing to be a problem and it is possible that the hemlock looper may suddenly explode. The reason why I say possible is because we have more data on the hemlock looper, some work has been done by provincial entomologists in New Brunswick, we found there is another parasite that can cause immediate population collapse in the spring.
Up to this time, we have been sampling in the winter. So you sample in the winter and this parasite kicks in in the spring, so you have these horrendously high numbers. You get ready for an outbreak and then it collapses. That is what happened in Quebec and that is what encouraged it, they were predicting somewhere in the area of 1 million hectares of defoliation by the hemlock looper. They had airplanes, they had BTK, they had people hired and come spring, there was no hemlock looper and that, as it turned out, was the reason. What I'm predicting is those two right now.
MR. EPSTEIN: The sawfly is one . . .
MR. GEORGESON: The sawfly is one I am going to watch and the other is the hemlock looper.
MR. EPSTEIN: What might lead to an outbreak or a spreading?
MR. GEORGESON: It could be a number of things. Take the hemlock looper, for instance, let's say we get another dry summer. When you get a dry summer, you don't get a lot of spread of disease. What knocks the hemlock looper back is a fungus disease that gets into the population, actually two fungi and something called floria. If that does not reduce or weaken that population of hemlock looper, they are going to continue to build. Of all the eggs laid by a single adult, all you need are two to survive, 2 per cent survival, and you have got
a population increase. It doesn't take much to trip that up. If you go up to 3 per cent or 4 per cent, even, you're headed for outbreak.
[10:00 a.m.]
MR. EPSTEIN: So a change in climatic conditions, is that what you are pointing to?
MR. GEORGESON: It could be a change in climate, could just be a dry year, dry summer.
MR. EPSTEIN: Yes. In your introductory statement, you gave the example of the total number of insects compared to the total number of human beings on the planet. You said we depend. . .
MR. GEORGESON: That is an estimate, keep in mind. (Laughter)
MR. EPSTEIN: Sure, I understand. What I was interested in was your comment that we depend on the element of surprise for us to survive. But, surely, climate, predators and competition for food are the real controls, are they not? I mean, the comment seemed peculiar, given what you then went on to explain about how there are these predators and there are. . .
MR. GEORGESON: Yes, okay, I see where you are coming from.
MR. EPSTEIN: Yes. So why did you direct our attention to the element of surprise?
MR. GEORGESON: The element of surprise. Okay. Well, keep in mind that as an entomologist, I have a different view of the world. What I mean by that is, we could not have civilization until we learned to protect our crops or our stored food products from insects.
Basically, when we talk about insects, yes, 99 per cent of them will cycle on their own without infringing on us but it is the ones that infringe on us that we have to manage at times. Now, the more information we have, the better job we can do at it. I think that is what I was driving for.
MR. EPSTEIN: Okay, all right. I have more questions but I will yield to whoever is next.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you. Bill Langille, we will turn to you, please.
MR. WILLIAM LANGILLE: Thank you very much. Well, it certainly has been an interesting topic, this morning. I am very interested in this.
Just for clarification, when you say introduced, you mean they were introduced to Nova Scotia by mistake, not being brought here by somebody, just to clarify that one?
MR. GEORGESON: That's right. You've got so many names. You go through the literature: introduced, non-native, exotics. That was a classic when that first came out.
MR. LANGILLE: Before I get into Nova Scotia, there is quite a devastation going on in the interior of British Columbia right now.
MR. GEORGESON: Yes.
MR. LANGILLE: Millions of factors.
MR. GEORGESON: Mountain pine beetle.
MR. LANGILLE: Could you elaborate on that, just what type of insect that is that is devouring the trees out there?
MR. GEORGESON: Yes, it is a type of bark beetle. Normally, they go through cycles. Much like our native spruce beetle here, they tend to attack mature trees, often damaged trees and their population will build up there.
Now what normally seems to knock them down is cold weather. Essentially, the insect, over winter, is underneath the bark in pupae and larvae. A colder winter with less snowfall, of course, means they get more die-off because of chill, so to speak.
What happened in that area is that they also are experiencing warmer winters so we had a skyrocketing survival, plus, I think, there was, in one area - I know the entomologist out there, and he said there is one area - in particular that seemed to form an epicenter, that was far damaged. The trees weren't killed but they were damaged; the beetle got in there.
Essentially, what they tried to do out there to control that is to harvest - picture this, you've got an outbreak. It tends to form a pocket and spread out from the pocket, the same as our spruce beetle does here. If you get in there and cut that pocket, and cut a small buffer around it, you can often contain it there. But right now, I mean, it is killing trees in an area almost as big as this province.
MR. LANGILLE: Thank you. Now, the other thing I want to touch on right now before I get into the insects, there was quite a debate on a few years ago about planting trees after they were cut, rather than letting them grow up natural, in Nova Scotia.
MR. GEORGESON: Yes.
MR. LANGILLE: The reason I am bringing this up is the trees that we have planted here - and I'm going back to the 1950's right up to current - I remember back in the 1950's, where the Department of Natural Resources - Lands and Forests - they wanted people, private landowners, to plant red pine. Now they have been into Norway spruce.
The reason I bring that up is, the red pine that were planted, they weren't native here. We had the white pine. Now, what happened to the red pine, you had what was called the European shoot moth that got into it.
MR. GEORGESON: Yes.
MR. LANGILLE: It didn't kill it but it dwarfed it, stunted it and then they shoot up. Can you just explain the European shoot moth here, what it does and how it came to be?
MR. GEORGESON: Yes. Well, it is another one of those insects that came in on landscape material and was distributed out of a greenhouse. It made several locations. Essentially what the pine shoot beetle does - or European pine - I was thinking of a different one, sorry - essentially what it does is the larvae feeds on the shoot tip, as you know, and you get a great ball of wax and growth, and it is a real ugly mess. The thing over-winters there. So if you get cold winters it dies because it wasn't meant for this climate. So it dies, it drops off.
I know what you mean about - it is starting to increase again. Is this the aspect? It is starting to increase but . . .
MR. LANGILLE: If I may, where I am going with this, I guess, is, we are introducing non-native trees to Nova Scotia which are susceptible to different types of disease. Now, the red spruce are native trees of Nova Scotia. It is probably one of the most hardiest trees in Nova Scotia, and I think it is, for obvious reasons. It is a survivor, it survives.
Now, we introduce Norway spruce. My observation, right now, the beetle has got into the tops of the Norway spruce and you have got five suckers going up now - five leaders, I should say, not suckers, developing. Are you on top of this or do you work with Natural Resources on this?
MR. GEORGESON: Yes, actually, we do.
MR. LANGILLE: What is causing this in the Norway spruce? I personally think it is a mistake to be introducing these trees.
MR. GEORGESON: Well, what happened is that the insect you are describing is the white pine weevil. It is a native weevil that is taking advantage of the Norway spruce.
Now, the idea, I think, when it was originally planted, was the Norway spruce would outgrow the beetle damage. Like, even if the leader was killed, you have got a secondary coming up. That works until you get a high density of beetles.
We have done some work back in 1994 and 1995 on that one so we can have some tools to give people with lots that were interested in controlling this. We tried different types of strategies from injection of insecticides, which really didn't work well in the pine, to controlled - well we found what worked best was to prune the darn things. If the guy could get in there with a crew and prune off the affected beetles before the beetles left - the key time was in late fall and early spring - prune it and burn it. Prune off the affected ends, take it away and burn it. It sounds pretty simple but it worked. A guy actually went in there with a crew and did a substantial lot and he had great success at it.
MR. MACAULAY: If I could just add to that, the vast majority of our plantation trees are red spruce. It is our native tree, it is our provincial tree. Less than 10 per cent of what we plant would be Norway spruce. The Norway spruce outgrows and out-produces our native red spruce by a dramatic amount.
We found, even with the weevil damage, the vast majority of the Norway spruce will grow through the weevil damage, unless it is really dramatic and then, of course, we wouldn't be recommending planting Norway spruce in that area if you had those kinds of numbers.
Typically, with the weevil damage, it will grow through that, straighten back up and in five or ten years you wouldn't know that the weevil damage was there. It is a very rapid growing species.
MR. LANGILLE: Yes. I thank you for that. What you're saying is that when you prune them and catch them - like, every person can't be doing that. I mean, that is a lot of money and you have to catch it prior to it doing the damage, after the fact.
MR. MACAULAY: I think the pruning is only if you found yourself in a really high population number and you already have a fair amount of time invested in your plantation. That's one way. It is very, very rare that we are into pruning. It will do that naturally, it will self-prune and one leader will take off and it will grow through that and still give us a better growth rate than the red spruce.
MR. LANGILLE: I hope that is the case, because I have thousands of them planted. Plus pine trees too.
The other thing is, you made a very interesting statement and that was that in Cape Breton the reason that the spruce budworm was controlled was because you cut off the food supply chain. I believe you used - was it 98 per cent or . . .
MR. MACAULAY: It was 92 per cent.
MR. LANGILLE: So after they devour the forest, they can't survive of course because there is no food left. I found that very interesting but it makes sense. I realize the cycle of our natural insects that we have here in the province.
Something else that I want to touch on is the lumber companies that are cutting the firs and spruce. As you know, when you cut the fir and spruce, the natural phenomena that takes place is that hardwood grows on that. You cut hardwood, it is natural that softwood grows on that. But yet we are in a very heavy spraying mode at this time, killing our hardwood that would be coming up naturally so they can plant the spruce. Now, has this anything to do with upsetting the natural cycle of the insects?
MR. MACAULAY: The reason for doing that has nothing to do with the insect. Typically what you are referring to is when an area, whether it is by fire, clear cut or whatever, loses vegetation what you get back is pioneer hardwood species. They are not necessarily the kind of species you would like to see in a crop because they are short lived and poor quality in form usually. Their purpose often is to provide the shade for the natural seeding of the more climax or the softwood, if softwood came off that site. The general purpose is to speed up the rotation, because if you left that to nature that rotation on that site may take 100 or 200 years to get back what you had before. By doing vegetation control - if that was the question - in planting it back to the red spruce - if that was where the red spruce site was - we can shorten that cycle to 40 to 50 years. That's why that's done.
MR. LANGILLE: I understand that and I understand what you're saying about the other types of trees.
MR. MACAULAY: There is one thing, if I could - and I don't mean to interrupt you and I apologize but I guess we should add that if there is that kind of a program and that program is not increasing, it has been decreasing just about every year for a couple of reasons: one is that we are planting a lot less total plant, we are getting in more fill planting and we're encouraging a lot more natural regeneration on sites that will take over on their own. There are several areas of the province where the cycle isn't as dramatic, where you do get spruce back at a very high percentage.
I guess the other point I should make is that even with a herbicide program, you are never 100 per cent successful. So you do get a fairly reasonable percentage of hardwood surviving on the site and you have a mixed wood stand at best unless you do another treatment or another intervention.
MR. LANGILLE: Do I have time for one more?
MR. CHAIRMAN: Yes.
MR. LANGILLE: You gave a good scenario about the different ways to get rid of the insect with the kitchen fly. On that basis, are we doing anything proactive rather than reactive, after the fact, where are we going? You must be able to determine what is coming next?
MR. GEORGESON: Yes, that's what we determine through the monitoring end of it. It gives us a pretty good idea of what is coming next. Nature is full of surprises though. Things will come right out of the blue and get you sometimes and at that point you become reactive rather than proactive. Take the spruce budworm, like I said, it is off the radar screen right now but we are going to increase surveying, because it is increasing in other areas. So that will give us a heads-up. If we can get even, hopefully, a five years' heads-up, that will enable to put things together. (Interruption) We are not static on those trapping methods, we're working with the CFS all the time, with the research scientists in developing better traps, better mousetraps so to speak, pheromones, attractive traps, a whole spectrum of ones. It is easier to have insects come to you than you have to chase after them.
[10:15 a.m.]
MR. LANGILLE: I just want to reiterate that I certainly appreciated your presentation. I have a lot questions and a lot of concerns on this, because this is an area that is affecting all of Nova Scotia. I think through this committee and through you and hopefully the media is one place where we can get the information out to the people. I thank you.
MR. CHAIRMAN: I think you can see by the nature of the questions that you are receiving today that most of the members around this table are from rural Nova Scotia and forest protection and forest management and the forest industry, indeed, are very important to our constituencies.
So we will now turn to David Hendsbee.
MR. HENDSBEE: With regard to the honourable member for Colchester North, the media just left so we have to do our own job.
I want to start off in a few different areas. First of all, the definition of pest, I have always known pest as not just insects but it also could be vegetation, weeds, fungus or bacteria, because of our terminology of pesticides, it is not just a herbicide or it could be insecticide or it could be a fungicide. My question is to you in regard to pests. What other type of pest management have we been doing in this province with regard to fungus and bacteria problems?
MR. GEORGESON: That's a part we look at too, the only problem is we don't have a trained forest pathologist on staff. But what we have done is made a network with scientists in CFS who are trained as forest pathologists and we get them to help identify it. Once we know it, sometimes if you find that there is a particular disease in a tree or let's say in a group
of trees then you can contact another area which has already dealt with it and then get ideas from them what to do to prevent it or reduce it. So we are not doing a lot of active research, no, but we do have a network that we can pull in if needed.
MR. HENDSBEE: For the purpose of Hansard, CFS, is that the Canadian Forestry Service?
MR. GEORGESON: Yes, it is.
MR. HENDSBEE: Thank you. In regard to other pests and stuff, there was some talk about vegetation and I want to know about your control management process for the deciduous trees that sometimes take over clear-cut areas or forest burnt areas, you mentioned about trying to enhance it. Is there any spraying right now of defoliation or trying to minimize the growth of deciduous trees to let the coniferous trees come through? Has there been any great deal? You said it has been cutting down over the years.
MR. GEORGESON: There has been a cutting down over the years of that. It used to be handled by our group but it is being handled by another right now.
Basically, like what Ed said, on free leased Crown land, that is Crown land that is not leased by any group, were the ones we worked with, very seldom over 1,000 hectares a year, at tops, that we dealt with.
MR. MACAULAY: We co-operated for a number of years with the Department of Environment, who regulate the use of pest control products in Nova Scotia. We are part of their review process. They include our department and the Department of Health. Our role is to assess the need for the treatment and when an application is made we actually have one of our technicians visit the site and make certain that there is sufficient competing vegetation that the treatment is warranted. So that is our only role in that particular program other than, as Eric has pointed out, on that portion of Crown land where there isn't a management contract.
MR. HENDSBEE: So in the past, the old stories of Agent Orange are long gone. But the question is in regard for instance to the power line corridors, Nova Scotia Power would they go now and just use labour techniques and go in and just clear cut underneath the power line corridors instead of just using the spray method?
MR. MACAULAY: They have. Actually, there are some interesting things starting to happen with regard to that. They have been in touch with our department on looking at alternatives to doing that, other ways to manage vegetation so that it is shorter, it doesn't necessarily become a problem.
Their problem is they don't want it to get established and interfere with the power grid. They are working with our wildlife division on types of vegetation they could plant that would be beneficial for wildlife that doesn't necessarily get very high, there is lesser shrub that would control any of the other vegetation coming in. We have got several experiments with them in that regard and we are working on a regular basis, I guess.
MR. HENDSBEE: Okay. Alternative methodologies versus spraying. I know there are biological insecticidal soaps, there is systematic insecticides, you talked about tree injections. Has there been any further progress on predatory species, like for instance, a lot of gardens will use ladybugs to control the aphid control, or woodpeckers will go in against the bark borers, or the purple martins, sparrows and bats can be used for mosquitoes, moths and stuff. How much of this other alternative methodology is being encouraged by the department?
MR. GEORGESON: We are working on that, actually, in the Christmas tree group, in particular, twig aphids, various aphids that affect Christmas trees. We have been working on - there is a fly called the flower fly or the hover fly which is prime - a little bit more effective in the Christmas tree situation than the ladybird beetle. We have been actively pursing that.
Now, it is slow slogging because no one has really worked at what flies are here, how many and whatnot of this particular group, but I'm hopefully within half a year of having that nailed down. Yes, we are working on it. Probably not to the extent that the federal research people are. I know they are working quite a bit on it but that is something that we are doing, yes.
MR. HENDSBEE: Now, you mentioned about the pheromones and the scent bait traps. To what degree are they presently being used and how much are they being spread out to, perhaps, environs around metro, in regard to the different type of insects?
MR. GEORGESON: I can't answer for metro but I can answer for the province. Most of our surveys are province-wide. Essentially, we have a system, this coming year we are planning on putting out 10 different traps, to draw in 10 different key insects. They are literally that. They just draw those insects in. We put them out, we bring them back, we do the counts and then we have mathematics that we put it through.
MR. MACAULAY: How many traps in total?
MR. GEORGESON: How many traps in total? We are probably looking somewhere in the area of 800 to 900.
MR. HENDSBEE: Now, are those dispersed by staff or is there a network of community-minded individuals, organizations that would help facilitate with the distribution or placement of them?
MR. GEORGESON: Most of these are through our department, the Pest Detection Officers in the field. They have been trained in how to place these things because some of them have to be monitored daily, to pack up the stuff and ship it back to us. We do have some of the industry guys that are starting to put out traps but we try to supervise them so that the information comes back to a central location and we can add it to our general analysis.
MR. HENDSBEE: How much of a problem have you had with nursery stock coming into the province, with all the landscaping and garden centre industries in this province? A lot of the nursery stock for ornamental or some shrubs are coming in from outside the province, from Ontario or beyond. Are we having any problem with infestation of any sort from that stuff?
MR. GEORGESON: I can't really answer that because that was handled by the agricultural group, landscaping, even shrubs and whatnot, was generally under their grouping.
MR. HENDSBEE: There were a couple of questions earlier, or comments stated here about the private woodlot owners versus Crown land. Have you had an infestation problem in regard to doing a spray problem? What kind of co-operation or hassles have you might of been getting from private woodlot owners who have access to either monitor or to treat any infestations that may be on non-Crown land?
MR. GEORGESON: Well, essentially, what happens - because we can't spray a private woodlot without the permission of the owner - if enough private landowners could get together - woodlot owners - would get together, and if we could form their woodlots into a manageable block, because you're thinking you've got an airplane flying over, you have to have a size, otherwise it is too small, it just can't target in. If they all agree and say, yes, we want our land sprayed, then, yes.
MR. HENDSBEE: Now, if they do that, are they charged for the service or is it just a service that we provide because it is a control of the environment?
MR. MACAULAY: Typically, we don't charge private landowners for that kind of service. We often may charge a larger industry if it is mostly their property.
What Eric was alluding to, and we have had several examples, the same thing happened with the spruce budworm. We had a large block that we thought was key so
landowners had to choose to be in or out. Then we didn't spray anyone who didn't want their property sprayed.
MR. HENDSBEE: In regard to the latest announcement by the Department of Natural Resources about the clear-cutting or tree harvesting techniques with these legacy trees or clumps, do you find it is going to have more of an effect for natural seeding than to actually have to go in and try to do vegetation control or do manual planning?
MR. MACAULAY: Generally, you're going to find you can divide the province pretty much in two zones, I guess. If you are looking at the western end, we have never had a problem with the natural regeneration. Most of the western end, regardless of how you treat the stands it comes back to red spruce and the kinds of species you are looking for. Usually, you are going to get that anyway.
On the eastern end, we have got much more of a fixed forest with spruce and balsam fir. We tend to get a lot more of the pioneer hardwoods coming back with balsam fir, then red spruce coming back later. So it requires a certain amount of intervention.
In the past we have gone in and taken all of that out, planted all red spruce and then tried to control it with vegetation. What I was referring to is, now we are looking more at what the natural red spruce is that is already there and fill-planting to offset it.
MR. HENDSBEE: Right. Now what co-operation or collaborations have you had with the municipality? I know that, for instance, in metro here, there is a major problem with leaf miners in the birch and elm trees. I don't know if that becomes a problem outside the urban core, outside in the more rural areas, but is there any co-operation with the municipalities with regard to their spray programs or insecticide control programs?
MR. GEORGESON: Not with their spray programs. They handle that on their own. The only time we assist them is, sometimes they get some odd insects that they can't identify and they ship it to our ID lab in Shubenacadie.
MR. HENDSBEE: I will ask a few questions in regard to the brown spruce longhorn beetle, whatever. In regard to the quarantine zone around metro and stuff, I have a number of - I guess you would call them firewood haulers, softwood lumber yards, and everything else like that in the East Preston-Mineville area. They are quite concerned about the limitation or the embargo they kind of have on their livelihood, where they can't go in and harvest as much as they would like to harvest for firewood purposes, for small logs, saw logs, or when they start cutting, that they have to cut off so much of the bark that they are taking quite a bit of the fibre underneath the bark, leaving not very much left for lumber material and stuff. When do you expect the quarantine or the loosening of the restrictions in the metro area on the beetle?
MR. GEORGESON: That will depend on CFIA. Definitely, if the beetle is eradicated and even after it is eradicated it will still be on for several years until they know it is eradicated.
MR. HENDSBEE: CFIA, standing for?
MR. GEORGESON: The Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
MR. HENDSBEE: We saw this map of the quarantined area, do you guys have access and availability to that map showing the quarantined area of metro and could that be possibly supplied to some of the metro folk that are affected? My constituency of Preston is almost included totally in that.
MR. GEORGESON: Yes, they should be available through CFIA because they want people to know where those quarantined areas - is that what you mean - where the boundaries are?
MR. HENDSBEE: Yes.
MR. MACAULAY: I think we should just make mention of the fact that there is a committee that is looking at the brown spruce longhorn beetle and we certainly have our people sitting on that committee and on most of the subgroups that are working for it. So we are not only part of the map or know of the map, we are part of the work that went into developing it and doing the sampling that is necessary to devise the boundaries. Yes, we can make sure of that.
[10:30 a.m.]
MR. HENDSBEE: If you could supply me with a map, plus the names of the people I could contact further about that, because I do have constituents who are concerned in regard to this infringing upon their livelihood, they want to know when they can go back to a practice of hauling their softwood and lumber and firewood out of the forest in the affected areas.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Before I turn to Mr. Boudreau, last July DNR went to Pictou looking for signs of the longhorn beetle. You indicated earlier that it was in the establishment stage. I was wondering if there was any indication that it exists in Pictou County forests?
MR. GEORGESON: No.
MR. CHAIRMAN: There was no indication? That's good news then.
MR. GEORGESON: We checked. It was just the ports we were going to.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Oh, I see.
MR. GEORGESON: What we did was essentially have CFIA look at their records, and they have records of all shipments. They said okay, we had products from Central Europe in these ports at one time or another, and it was part of a joint effort with CFIA that we went out and checked those ports. They came out negative.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Good.
MR. GEORGESON: I'm not the least bit disappointed.
MR. CHAIRMAN: You mentioned that plants and fauna and so on come under Agriculture.
MR. GEORGESON: In landscaping, yes.
MR. CHAIRMAN: In conversation yesterday regarding today's meeting with a group of people, someone mentioned that someone they knew had taken back a cactus from a foreign country, no doubt illegally in their suitcase. I don't think you're allowed to bring them in.
MR. GEORGESON: Oh no.
MR. CHAIRMAN: And the thing started shaking in their house, shivering and all of a sudden there was a bunch of spiders that came wiggling out of the thing. It had a hatch, and they immediately threw it in the woodstove or fireplace. That's pretty scary.
MR. GEORGESON: There is some bizarre stuff.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Hopefully controls that are in place now at our airports will put a stop to that sort of thing as well.
MR. GEORGESON: We hope so but there are so many little things that get in.
MR. CHAIRMAN: People just don't realize.
MR. GEORGESON: I remember a bunch of battery cases came in in a container that arrived in Yarmouth, just a small shipment, and the guy opened it up and this rather large spider scampered out. He caught it in a Tim Hortons coffee cup, which seems to be the container of choice, and shipped it down to us. We didn't know what it was when it first arrived. We dropped in an aquarium and fed the darn thing to keep it alive until we could make identification. We identified it, it turns out it was about 10 times more poisonous than the black widow.
MR. CHAIRMAN: It was quite a large spider, was it?
MR. GEORGESON: Yes. You know how big our river spiders are, maybe about that long. It was significant.
MR. CHAIRMAN: I do recall a big spider coming into Pictou County on some bananas at a local grocery store.
MR. GEORGESON: Yes, spider bananas.
MR. CHAIRMAN: They're not dangerous, are they?
MR. GEORGESON: No. A nasty bite but . . .
MR. CHAIRMAN: The butcher took care of that with his big knife. (Laughter)
MR. GEORGESON: Sometimes there's not a lot left when we get them to identify.
MR. CHAIRMAN: I am sure a lot of these exotic creatures end up on your desk.
MR. GEORGESON: On my desk, on my doorstep at home.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Your wife must be very pleased about that.
MR. GEORGESON: Yes.
MR. CHAIRMAN: I am going to turn to Mr. Boudreau.
MR. BOUDREAU: Mr. Chairman, first of all I want to thank our guest for coming in, because certainly you've been very informative and educational, at least for me, so I want to thank you for coming in. I just want to comment that the centre certainly does have a fine reputation, and I think that reflects, of course, on the efforts of the staff. I want to congratulate you for running such a fine facility to begin with.
The first question is going to be pointed Cape Breton, since I am a Cape Breton MLA . . .
MR. HENDSBEE: And a pest, too. (Laughter)
MR. BOUDREAU: I've been called worse than that, Mr. Chairman. The spruce budworm, is that finally under control down there, or does it continue to be a threat?
MR. GEORGESON: No, at this time it's not on the radar screen. We found the odd moth, but we have not found the other stage of it that we looked for which is the small larva, the L2 we call it. Right now I would still class it as in the background levels. What's worrisome, when I look over the past outbreak, we essentially went from zero to moderate and high all within about three years. When it starts to build, it builds fairly quickly. We have better tools to look for it now, and I am hoping these tools will give us a longer time. Right now we're okay with the spruce budworm.
MR. BOUDREAU: Okay and it's not really a threat anywhere else in Nova Scotia?
MR. GEORGESON: No, nowhere else in Nova Scotia.
MR. BOUDREAU: I guess I want to comment about staff. Are you short on staff? Do you feel you have adequate staff. I know there have been a lot of cutbacks in the last few years and I don't imagine your centre is any different than any other government department, really, but do you feel you have an adequate staff to monitor Nova Scotia?
MR. GEORGESON: I've been extremely lucky, actually, our staff is good. Keith Moore has just recently been transferred over to us this summer and actually it's really looking good; I'm happy with it.
MR. BOUDREAU: Good to hear that.
MR. MACAULAY: I think if he was being really honest he would probably say he could always use more but the insect disease situation is one that really hasn't received a lot of the cutbacks the government has taken over a number of years, they've stayed pretty healthy.
MR. BOUDREAU: Thank you for that. I noticed in your presentation you indicated you work with other government departments. Could you indicate which ones?
MR. GEORGESON: The Department of Environment and Labour, the Department of Agriculture - you mean provincial departments?
MR. BOUDREAU: Yes.
MR. GEORGESON: Yes, we work with them. Those are probably the two main ones. The Department of Health of late has been a fairly critical one as well. We have been sharing our expertise. The insects are a problem in a number of different areas, so we provide information and advice to them.
MR. BOUDREAU: With regard to the Department of Agriculture, I know last year in Cape Breton there was a bug that attacked crops, particularly cabbage and turnip on the mainland . . .
MR. GEORGESON: The army cutworm?
MR. BOUDREAU: I believe it was. However, apparently it was present on the mainland and there was some type of control process put in place but, however, it was headed for Cape Breton. Nobody in the department or within government even informed the farmers in Cape Breton. Before they knew it they were attacked by this insect and I believe because of their knowledge and abilities they prevented a serious destruction of crops. I'm wondering why or how could this communication break down or how could this happen in the world today with all its technology? Why did this happen?
MR. GEORGESON: I don't really understand that either. There were quite a few media reports on that and I remember getting some calls on that. Again, because it is a forage crop it fell under Agriculture. I'm not passing the buck, it's just I have my hands so full with what's going on in the forests. If any media types called I referred them on to the Department of Agriculture or if they just wanted to know the life cycle of the insect, I could talk about the insect biology but as actual tactics a farmer could use, I wasn't up to date on them. Besides, it was pretty much out of my ballpark anyway. (Interruption) Yes, our system. Ed has pointed out to me that essentially if we have a problem developing, we have communications with our PDOs, our pest detection officers in the field and they can get out to those concerned people fairly quickly.
MR. BOUDREAU: My concern here is not to lay blame. I'm not looking to lay blame on the Department of Agriculture or yourself or anybody; what happened, happened. What I am concerned about is the next few years and it happening again. I'm wondering is there a process in place because of this breakdown so that Cape Breton farmers can receive adequate information with regard to insect attacks on their crops?
MS. MCINNIS-LEEK: I guess one thing, as Eric was trying to explain, is that our responsibility only falls to forest pests. We don't get involved or have any capacity dealing with forage crop pests. That's an area that is completely within the realm of the Department of Agriculture and any system that would have to be put in place would have to be done by them. We have parallels in terms of how we deal with notifying our client groups that may be of interest to them, but they also have a very well-developed system for informing people but have been under a great deal of pressure as a department in terms of their staffing resources and extension resources over a number of years. That's really a question that would have to be directed to Agriculture, it's not one we would have any capacity to answer because we don't deal with any of those types of insects.
MR. CHAIRMAN: If I might interrupt for just a minute, Mr. Boudreau, the Department of Agriculture will be presenting to this committee and we'll have an opportunity to perhaps put those questions on the back burner and deal with them at that time.
MR. BOUDREAU: Absolutely, Mr. Chairman, but I also want to ensure that when that particular department appears here that they are not going to turn around and blame the centre unfairly. I want to make sure I have the spokesman for the centre on record and if I hear correctly, it's not really their responsibility to monitor crops, although when we fall under the insect thing, then will the Department of Agriculture try to lay the blame somewhere else? That's what I'm trying to ensure; I'm not trying to lay the blame on anybody or any department, I just want to ensure it doesn't take place again.
I will change my line of questioning, I know there was a barge, an offshore barge that came into Dartmouth, there were some reports of insects on that barge. In fact, I spoke with some of the crew members who indicated there were insects on that particular barge. I'm wondering if the type of insects that were there, were you aware of them and were they a danger to the population of Dartmouth?
MR. GEORGESON: No, I don't know anything about that one. Birds carry insects all the time. In fact, they actually carry something that looks like a flattened housefly but . . .
SOME HON. MEMBERS: A barge.
MR. GEORGESON: I'm sorry, it's my hearing. My wife says I'm deafer than a board. No I haven't heard anything about that, I'm sorry.
MR. BOUDREAU: It was an offshore platform that was used in a foreign country over on the other side of . . .
MR. GEORGESON: Spiders.
MR. BOUDREAU: Was that something to do with spiders?
MR. GEORGESON: Yes, I did get a call on that. I asked whoever called me to either send it to me or the Nova Scotia Museum for identification of what they were. I later read in the paper they went in with a fumigation unit and they fumigated. They said something about the spiders being poisonous but I can't remember if anybody ever identified it. It could have been a harmless garden variety or it could have been a black widow, there's no way of knowing. I know we get our share of black widows coming into the lab.
MR. BOUDREAU: It kind of interested me. Here we have a situation in Dartmouth, it is a populated area, we have spiders coming in there that we don't even know what they are; if they are a danger, we don't know about it. They don't even really rely on your ability or knowledge for a recommendation on this particular spider. I know you just told me that you're not responsible for agricultural products, however, it is insects. I'm kind of baffled.
MR. GEORGESON: Anything that comes in from outside the country, the federal government has to take the first crack at it, that's their job. Within the province itself, we have the pest detection officer system set up and they almost act like our eyes and our hands in the field. If something odd happens in the forest, they're pretty quick at getting that information back to us in Shubie. Then if we look at it and it looks like a potential problem, we will immediately dispatch skilled people out to survey that area, to look at it and to determine, how dangerous is this thing? Will it spread? Will it affect the industry? Will it affect people? Will it affect their way of living? You have to answer a whole bunch of questions.
Once we finish that, we have a newsletter that goes out to PDOs and all of this information is on there. We hope to get a lot of this on the Web site very shortly. Life is full of hopes and dreams but, anyway, also, a little bit interactive for the pest detection officers, in particular. So they can request information and we can get it back even quicker than we can now.
[10:45 a.m.]
Even on the form that they send in - let's say they find a strange insect out there. Somebody brings one in and says, hey, this is destroying my birch trees. What is it? They can't identify it. They send it to us, we identify it. They have a little check on top of the form - I want it faxed back, I want a phone call or I just want normal mail. If they want a phone call then we will call them as soon as we get it, as soon as we identify it, usually the same day, and get right back to them.
If it is one that could be in other areas, we contact the PDOs in those other areas and usually mention it in our newsletter as well so it looks significant. Even if it happens in Sydney, the guy down in Yarmouth knows that, hey, this is happening in Sydney, maybe I should go out and take a look around my neighbourhood just in case it is here. I could speak better on my own system, I guess, than I can on what CFIA does.
MR. BOUDREAU: Is an aphid a foreign insect or is it a local and is it an insect that the province is responsible for or is it a foreign insect?
MR. GEORGESON: It is basically a native insect. It is only the foreign ones that - well, some of them have been here for so long that they are accepted as being native now. For instance, the wooly adelgid. I mean, it has been here for over a century. Where do you draw
the line type of thing? An entomologist would never draw the line but in the minds of the public - you know, I have seen it forever so it must have been here forever.
MR. BOUDREAU: I just had one more question, Mr. Chairman, if I may. I had an area in my constituency - it is a rural area - it is adjacent to a farming community. It had three homes that, and I know this may seem coincidental, but they were attacked by house flies.
MR. GEORGESON: In the fall or spring?
MR. BOUDREAU: It was in the spring.
MR. GEORGESON: Okay. They usually clustered around the windows, didn't they?
MR. BOUDREAU: Well, they actually attacked the homes - one home had siding on it and the other two homes had shingles on them which seemed, (Laughter)
MR. GEORGESON: No, what they were, were cluster flies. That is another introduced insect. In the spring and the fall they are particularly bad. They tend to, over winter, as adults, seek out the warmest area. As the land around these houses cool, these flies will head towards it because the house is like a thermal marker to them. When they get there, these flies have the distinct characteristic of deforming their body. They will actually flatten their body. Like, you hit them with a book, and they will get into tight spaces. That is how they work themselves into houses.
I have been in houses where I pulled the trap door leading into the attic and got hit with an avalanche of flies. They were four inches deep in the attic. That is how numerous they can become in some areas. They are a parasite of the earthworms.
MR. BOUDREAU: Is there a way to eliminate them? Do these homeowners have an avenue to eliminate these pests?
MR. GEORGESON: Yes, when they call me up, I have a regime that they can follow. (Interruption) A fly-eating cat. Yes. (Laughter) There are actually a whole bunch of them.
MR. BOUDREAU: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you. Just for clarification, you mentioned parasite of the earthworm?
MR. GEORGESON: Yes.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Could you explain that?
MR. GEORGESON: Oh, those are those flies that you see in your house in the spring and the fall. In the spring they are trying to get out and that is why they get jammed up against the windows. Once they are out, they will fly close to the ground looking for earthworm castings. They will lay an egg right by the tunnel so that when the earthworm comes out, the fly-egg is programmed to immediately crack open, the larvae springs out, latches onto the earthworm and that is how it spends its summer, developing in the earthworm underground. It doesn't kill the earthworm. Pupae and the fly starts emerging in late summer and the fall.
MR. CHAIRMAN: For heavens sakes. That's interesting. That is not another fly story, is it? (Laughter)
MR. GEORGESON: That is another fly story, yes, it is. (Laughter)
MR. CHAIRMAN: I would like to tell you my circle fly joke but I guess we haven't got time. (Laughter) Bill Dooks, you have a couple of questions?
MR. DOOKS: Three little snappers. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
What is the symbolic provincial insect or do we have one? (Laughter)
MR. GEORGESON: I have often thought about it. We should have one, yes. (Laughter)
MR. DOOKS: Mr. Chairman, indeed, I think it would be great if we had an opportunity to go to your lab and research centre as a part of this committee. Maybe we can make a request or a motion later on. It has been very interesting today.
MR. CHAIRMAN: You can make it right now, if you would like.
MR. DOOKS: Well, Mr. Chairman, I will do that. I would like to put a motion on the floor that we do visit your centre.
MR. BOUDREAU: I will second that.
MR. GEORGESON: Oh, that would be great.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Okay, it has been moved and seconded. Would all those in favour of the motion please say Aye. Contrary minded, Nay.
The motion is carried.
MR. DOOKS: Thank you. So now you will have to invite us. (Laughter)
MR. GEORGESON: The power of committees. (Laughter) Then you will be on my home ground, won't you? Yes. (Laughter)
MR. DOOKS: With the threat of a warming climate - indeed, I guess it is apparently happening, regardless of different opinions on that from scientists - what forecast do you see or what is your forecast? Do you see us - well, I'm going to let you answer that. Not with the natural cycle of insects but because the whole climate is changing, what should we be aware of as a government 50 years down the road?
MR. GEORGESON: Well, that's a long shot.
MR. DOOKS: Yes, but here is your chance, write your thesis on this one. (Laughter) You understand the nature of the question. We concentrate on the warming climate constantly, what can we expect for generations to come? Dinosaurs? (Laughter)
MR. GEORGESON: No, I don't think we'll go back to dinosaurs but all I can base it on is the trend in the last few years. We have been getting, basically, warmer winters. Now, despite all the snow, the winter has been warm. The reason why we're getting more snow is because there is more water being generated off the warm oceans.
Essentially what they do is they get climatologists to come in and talk to us at a large forum in Ottawa which I go to once a year. All the provincial entomologists get together, and research scientists, and they talk to us. What they're saying is pretty well what is happening here. We are getting drier summers, more snow in the winter, but the winters generally are warmer. You are going to have time periods where it's going to seem like a flip back to the way it was but, in general, it tends to be warmer.
MR. DOOKS: So you don't see a problem?
MR. GEORGESON: I can see and other entomologists can see - I'm not the only one - like, what's happening in B.C. as an example. You get insects that were normally limited in one part of your province, moving further north because it's becoming better for them. For example, the dog tick here in Nova Scotia. Before it was in patches up to the Halifax-Windsor line. You didn't often find it beyond that. We are starting to pick up pockets of that now around St. Peter's, is the last area. They are hateful things.
MR. FANNING: I would like to add something to Eric's talk on that too, because I think it's interesting. I have been working with Eric now for six years. One thing that we had talked about, that projection on to 50 years, in particular, wherever that will be at that point, even if you go back 20 years to look at some of the things he is talking about, whether they be pheromones or the way we monitor stuff, the progression that is coming in place is, I think remarkable.
When you talk about the budworm problem in the early 1980's, where it took years to develop pheromones, well, Eric spearheaded with our federal counterparts that within three to four months they had an operational pheromones in place to try to have a better detection method for the tussock moth. When we look at these other products that we were using and trying to avoid going into a spray program with a product, that kind of progression is extremely interesting.
Again, going back to the tussock moth as an example, Eric, through his work, had a whole team of scientists from the Canadian agencies in Petawawa come down to look at the fungus and the viruses inside the tussock moth to try to understand how the thing collapsed naturally to make it better. Then we had scientists come from Fredericton, looking at natural viruses within the sawfly, which was another insect that he mentioned. I find that extremely interesting because what we are doing now is, we are getting down to those more specific things we talked about.
Someone asked the question about, how broad-based is it? Well, now we have the support from some of the federal scientists and I think we would like to have, maybe, some more, but they are getting down to those specifics so that later on, if we do have a new insect come in, we are talking now, if things go well, months rather than years. So that forecasting, that action plan and even the feds are experimenting now to go in so that if we can detect it earlier and find out what takes that insect down naturally, we can start, maybe, feeding that into that insect earlier to, maybe, get the insect to come down.
We can't stop the natural cycle. It will always be here. But maybe we can lessen that impact on it and do it in a lot more sensitive ways. That's one thing I find extremely interesting with this. Who knows where we'll be in five, 10, 50 years' time, but that time frame is quite a bit shortened and it is quite impressive, what is there.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Okay, thank you, Walter. Howard, did you have another question?
MR. EPSTEIN: A couple of questions, Mr. Chairman; I think we can deal with them very quickly. You mentioned PDOs, your pest detection officers. Who are they? How many are there? Where are they located?
MR. GEORGESON: There are 22 of them right now. They are located in most of our offices in the field so they are right out there. They are trained forest technicians.
MR. EPSTEIN: Is this a dedicated function for them or is it part of their general job duties?
MR. GEORGESON: It is part of it but an important part. For example, in the wintertime and at certain times there is not a lot of activity, but at other times they are practically 100 per cent at it.
MR. EPSTEIN: And about BTK. The things I wondered about BTK were, first, when did it become the policy of the province just to use BTK and not to use any chemical-based aerial sprays? The other thing I wondered is, whose job is to keep an eye on the current state of research with respect to BTK and other associated biological controls to see their potential effects on other elements of the ecosystem, including human health? Is that something that's done out of your department or some other department?
MR. GEORGESON: On the latter one, I do it out of interest because I use it. We've always used it. Back in 1979, we did the trial.
MR. EPSTEIN: I know it's been around for a long time, I was just wondering. You said it was the spray that was exclusively used now, if I heard you correctly.
MR. GEORGESON: That's right.
MR. EPSTEIN: When was that?
MR. GEORGESON: For aerial spraying.
MR. EPSTEIN: When did that become the case?
MR. GEORGESON: That was the trial in 1979, that was the first I knew. That was the first time we used it, come to think of it.
MR. EPSTEIN: But when did it become the exclusive item that was going to be used, or did I misunderstand?
MR. MACAULAY: No, he's correct. We've been operating from that policy for some time. I've been searching in my mind for that date, and I can't find it.
MR. EPSTEIN: That's fine, okay.
MR. MACAULAY: I can't find it, but it's somewhere in the mid 1980's when we had some options available for a control program. The government at that time decided they were going to go with the BTK; the policy was that we were not going to be looking at hard chemical unless it was absolutely essential.
MR. EPSTEIN: Right, that's good. The last point really had to do just with the Japanese beetle in the Cornwallis Park. Is my understanding correct that this is something that attacks only the leaves of primarily horticultural or ornamental plants, roses for example?
MR. GEORGESON: I think the adult does, but the grub that lives underground does attack the roots as well, it feeds on the roots.
MR. EPSTEIN: So what's the potential for damage?
MR. GEORGESON: In the urban area, in the ornamental area it's quite high, I understand.
MR. EPSTEIN: But not to agricultural plants or to the forests at all?
MR. MACAULAY: For forests, no I don't think. I'm not sure how it would impact on agriculture. That was a rather bizarre situation. That's where those steam pipes run underneath the ground, isn't it?
MR. EPSTEIN: I'm not sure, I've certainly seen those beetles. I went down to Cornwallis Park and saw them in the bushes. They are quite obvious, they're big and luminous.
MR. GEORGESON: They've been in that same area off and on now for - gosh, well in the 1960's I think. It's the steam pipes. They can't handle cold, freezing.
MR. EPSTEIN: So basically you're not worried about them.
MR. GEORGESON: No, right now I'm not. It's not on my radar screen. (Interruption)
MR. EPSTEIN: No, they're quite beautiful.
MR. CHAIRMAN: So there are no plans for the spring to go down there and try to eradicate them. It's not a necessity.
MR. GEORGESON: No, not on my plate.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you very much, Nancy, Eric, Ed and Walter for coming here today. As you very well know, it sparked a lot of interest. We were absolutely delighted to have you here. I hope that we can arrange to go down to your centre and perhaps see some of these bugs we've talked about - I know you have some great displays - and learn a little bit more about it. I can assure you that this topic and the work you do is very important to this committee and to our government. It's because of the quick and decisive action of DNR's
Forest Protection staff that we have survived a great many outbreaks of insects and bugs over the past years. All I can say is keep up the good work. The future of our forests is in your good hands, and they are in good hands.
MR. DOOKS: If we don't clear-cut it all.
MR. CHAIRMAN: If we don't clear-cut it all, as Mr. Dooks says. That's a favourite topic of his. Having said that, my previous opening remarks about Mr. Fanning's success sparked some interest around the table. Not only are we interested in resources, but there are quite a few sports-minded people around this table too, so I have to enlarge on that and take you back to 1981. The Canada Games Nova Scotia softball team went on to victory with a 3-1 upset over Ontario. They weren't expected to win, as I understand, Walter, and they went on a - thanks to Walter - 1 to 0 win over Saskatchewan and Walter struck out five batters and confused his opponents with his changeup and drop ball producing grounders, and also his pop flies. So we're back to flies again. (Laughter) So, Walter is indeed a Nova Scotia sports hero. I guess Bill as a ballplayer as well wants to ask, I know (Interruptions) Let's put it this way, ladies and gentlemen, our Resources meeting is over. We are now talking sports. So, Walter if you don't mind. Bill.
MR. LANGILLE: I believe I watched that game in Saskatchewan. Lyle Carter has a poster up there, the catcher jumping up. I imagine you have seen it there.
MR. FANNING: That was actually the Brookfield Elks, the seniors team, when they won gold in 1980. We were in 1981. We were with the Nova Scotia junior team, the following year. I joined the Elks in 1982 after we won. I played 10 years for them too.
MR. LANGILLE: Next month, in February, I am getting an induction into a mini-Hall of Fame, it is the Heritage in the Truro area, we won the Canadian Championships two years ago, seniors men's baseball, aged 35 and over. We're looking for players. We would love to have you. (Laughter) (Interruptions)
MR. CHAIRMAN: This conversation I guess can carry over after the meeting, but there is one item of business. I just want to mention that our next presenters will be Black Bull Resources and Mora will notify us when they will be able to attend. It is not confirmed yet. We will give you plenty of notice.
We are now adjourned.
[The meeting adjourned at 11:03 a.m.]