STANDING COMMITTEE ON RESOURCES
Mr. Neil LeBlanc
MR. CHAIRMAN: I would suggest that we start. Most of us have meetings subsequent to this event and I would like to start the meeting. I am sure we will be joined by some of the members as we commence. So if that is agreeable to all members, we will commence the meeting.
I would like to welcome our witnesses and perhaps if you could introduce your entourage, Mr. Graham, so all the members would be aware of who you have here from your department, it would be appreciated.
MR. DAN GRAHAM: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. To my immediate left is Nancy McInnis-Leek. She is the Director of our Forestry Program. To my right is Dan Eidt. He is the Director of our Crown Lands Program and seated directly behind me is John Mombourquette. He is the Director of our Enforcement Program. We welcome the opportunity to come before your committee this morning and to make a brief presentation on the status of Bill No. 5 and the amendments to the Forests Act, as well as an overview on the Crown Lands Act and an overview on our enforcement activities. Then, of course, we would be open for questioning by your committee.
With that brief introduction, I would ask Ms. McInnis-Leek to make a brief presentation. We have three presentations: one by Ms. McInnis-Leek, one by Mr. Eidt and one by Mr. Mombourquette. Maybe it would be best if we made all of those presentations, if the Chairman wishes, before we open it to questions.
MR. CHAIRMAN: That would be fine. I should also introduce the committee, of course, myself being Chairman, Neil LeBlanc, and the other members can introduce themselves.
[The committee members introduced themselves.]
MR. CHAIRMAN: Okay, please commence.
MS. NANCY MCINNIS-LEEK: Good morning. What I have been asked to do for you this morning is to give you an overview of the forest strategy and bill amendments to the Forests Act that went through the House in December 1998. What I will cover is the elements of what we call our forest strategy which came from what we called our position paper Toward Sustainable Forestry. There are basically nine elements within that which form the Nova Scotia Department of Natural Resources' strategy to how we manage forests in the future. It is a very important strategy for us. It is one that we are implementing not as a full package of one thing but as a number of different elements. So what I will do is give you an overview of what those elements are, tell you what the status of those is today and I will also tell you what our next steps are in terms of implementing the forest strategy.
One of the things that first was introduced through the Legislature in January 1998, was a piece of legislation called the Registration and Statistical Returns. That refers to the Registry of Buyers. The purpose of that was to establish a core for the forest strategy by identifying those in the forest sector who we would work with to try to implement a sustainable forest strategy for the department and for the province. That was implemented in January 1998. The first reporting year, the first year for collecting the statistics on harvest and how much we have used in the way of round wood and primary forest products in the province, occurred this spring and we will soon be releasing a report that documents what we have gathered through the registry of buyers. It requires annual registration and annual submission of statistical returns. It provides us a lot of the information we use in terms of implementing the forest strategy.
The Forests Act amendments, which were first introduced to the Legislature in the spring of 1998 were then reintroduced in the fall and passed third reading in December 1998. What those do is they allow us to implement parts of the forest strategy which we do not have the current authority to do. So there are a number of key amendments which some of you may be familiar with. They were given third reading, as I said, but the amendments to the Act have not yet been proclaimed so they are not yet in force.
The wood sustainability plan was a key element of the forest strategy. It is our tool that we are going to use to implement silviculture in the province. It is one that has to be implemented by regulation and it is part of the package associated with the Forests Act amendments.
Wildlife habitat management is something we have been involved with, as the Department of Natural Resources, for some time. We have had guidelines and standards in place for over 10 years. What we are looking at and responding to, as far as a request from the forest community is to turn some of those into regulations to create a level playing field. We are in the process of drafting those regulations as well as the wood sustainability regulations.
The Forest Practices Code is an element of the strategy which deals with Crown Land in particular as a requirement and it will be a guiding principle that can be used on private land. The intention is to set up a number of key principles, key practices that we feel are sustainable in terms of forest management. They are something, also, that both the public and the forest sector have been requesting for some time. They will be an amalgamation of what we have been doing and what we have learned through forest research in some of our other practices manuals, plus, over time, we will amend those as experience is gained, and improve upon them.
In the Forests Act amendments, one of the things we requested is the authority to collect what we call harvest information. One of the difficulties we have in the department is to identify physically where harvests are occurring at a time which allows us to track what types of harvest are occurring, what types of practices are being used, how our guidelines and standards are being implemented and how our laws are being followed. This is something which we haven't quite formalized the approach for. We had originally conceived an approach which, under review, turns out to be not the best so we are currently looking at how we would manage that requirement in the future.
The Sustainable Forestry Fund is tied to, on the previous slide, the Wood Acquisition Plan. It is part and parcel of our silviculture program or a way of dealing with silviculture in the private sector. It is an option, as part of that Wood Acquisition Plan, and it is funds set up through the Act amendments, to allow us to collect money and spend it on private land silviculture.
When we were doing work on developing a forest strategy from the coalition days through the department, there was a lot of interest in having more formal and greater opportunity for the public and interest groups to have input to public policy. The element in the strategy that deals with this, called advisory groups, and we are currently developing terms of reference for a technical advisory group that we will probably have up in place, to be able to help us with the regulations and some of the other things we will be doing in terms of implementation of the strategy.
State of the Forestry Report refers to a requirement that we, as a Department of Natural Resources, has on a national level and Canada has on an international level, that is to report on how we are attaining sustainable forestry and report on a lot of the issues which have been identified nationally and internationally, and locally, as important in the forest
sector. We are currently developing an outline for that and will look to, within probably the next year, producing our first state of the forest report.
An element in the forest strategy which is very key but not highlighted strongly in the position paper is our extension education efforts. Almost all of the elements of the forest strategy depend on a strong education and extension effort in order to be successful. They also depend greatly on the cooperation and working together with the public and various elements of the forest sector and other interest groups. We are developing a plan for how that would happen throughout the implementation of the strategy.
What I am going to do now is take you through those elements again but tell you what the next steps are in terms of implementing the forest strategy. When we took the Forests Act amendments through the Legislature last fall, one of the elements that was added at the request of members of the Legislature, was to have public review of new regulations and substantial amendments to regulations. As a result of this, we had hoped to take the two sets of draft regulations I identified, the Wood Acquisition Plan and the Wildlife Habitat Management Regulations, through to public review in June or July of this year. Following that, we have a requirement within, by policy, 60 days to produce a report that would be made public on that review. Following that procedure, we would then revise our regulations and proceed through to request approval.
Once we are in that process, we will implement the process of proclaiming the Act amendments which would bring that part of the Forests Act into force and there are parts of that which come into force immediately, which is one of the reasons we haven't gone through proclamation to date, is we are preparing for that possibility. We have to have a number of administrative and procedural structures in place in the department before we do that. We also, on the advice of our solicitors, needed to have the draft regulations in hand so that the public feels comfortable with what we are proceeding with before we proclaim them.
We hope to establish the technical advisory group I just mentioned, in September of this year. The intention is that that advisory group will assist us with the public review and the review of the comments that we receive, as well as advise us on terms of what types of changes we need to make in the proposed regulations. We hope to seek approval of the draft regulations in the fall of 1999, depending on the results of the public review, but we will enter them into the approval process at that time.
MR. CHAIRMAN: We are being joined by Gordon Balser, MLA for Digby-Annapolis.
MS. MCINNIS-LEEK: As I mentioned, the Wood Sustainability Regulations are very key to our achieving our sustainability of the forest industry and forest sector and the long-term use of forests for multiple purposes. We hope to implement those regulations beginning in the year 2000, which means that we had hoped to have them ready in the fall of 1999.
We also intend to implement the Wildlife Habitat Management Regulations - we keep changing the names of these, that is the difficulty - also by the end of the year 2000, which means that we hope to have them in place also by 1999. The forest practices code is an ongoing work in progress. We intend to have the framework document, which is the first level or step in that process, ready by April 2000. We have a series of what we call guidebooks and technical documents that will be part of that code and those will be built over time with completion to be by the year 2005. During that time, we will also be revising and improving as we go along.
That concludes my presentation on the forest strategy and where we are to date.
MR. GRAHAM: I would ask Dan Eidt to give an overview of, in particular, the Crown land aspect and how that is currently managed within DNR.
MR. DAN EIDT: I understood there was interest in having a brief overview of the Crown lands and allocations and management of the Crown lands. I just put up some approximate acreages. The Crown lands are about 26 per cent of the province, that is the land area. The in-land waters, 431,000 hectares for a total of 1,861,000 hectares which would be about 35 per cent of the province if you included the in-land waters. The forested land, 1,154,000 hectares.
At the bottom I am showing the area agreements for forestry, licence and management agreements, they are area-based. There is one in the seven eastern counties, with Stora, Enso Port Hawkesbury Limited and currently under that licence, there is approximately 1.5 million acres or 607,000 hectares. In Halifax East is Kimberly-Clark, those figures are just slightly out of date. There is a couple thousand hectares withdrawn for wilderness area in Kimberly-Clark's. That shows that approximately, of the forested area, slightly over half of it would be under area-based licence and management agreement.
Just to give you an overview of the method of wood volume allocation in the province, there are basically four methods. We have already talked about the first one a little bit under legislative Act. There are these licence and management agreements with Stora, Enso Port Hawksbury Limited and I didn't have time to update that, but that is Stora, Enso now, and Kimberly-Clark Limited. Again, the seven eastern counties for Stora and in Kimberly-Clark, it is basically in Halifax East or East Halifax County.
The other basic method is forest utilization licence agreements. I have another overhead just showing the provisions for that in the Crown Lands Act. They are volume agreements. They allow the province to enter into arrangements with sawmills and one hardboard plant to provide material for their milling needs.
A third method is the timber licences, they are normally awarded through the tender process. They are short in duration, usually up to two years, and occasionally the minister for some expedient thing, development, land development or something like that, we can make an arrangement to have forest land cleared off of an area that is coming under development, if it is being made available.
Letters of authority, they are very short term. They are usually annual, they are usually only for a month or two, and they allow individuals in the province access to volumes on Crown lands for personal use, typical fence posts, fuel wood, things of that nature.
I usually throw this one up, just for terminology, because the department and individuals are always talking about licensed lands and unlicensed lands, you will often hear this one referred to as being leased lands, these licence and management agreements are often referred to as leases. The unlicensed Crown land is the remainder of the land that is available for forestry, it is not all available for forestry. As you are well aware, some of it is protected wilderness areas, nature reserves.
The unlicensed land is where the volume agreements are usually issued. They don't overlap with the area agreements. That is where the timber licences are made available through the tender process, the exception, I guess, is the letter of authority. We do make arrangements sometimes for personal use permits with these area-based licensees.
Just a little bit about the licence and management agreements, they do have terms and conditions. The area is defined on the ground, very formally. There is a long-term plan, not less than 40 years. It is usually a harvesting and silvicultural strategy. Those are being worked on now, updated with the integrated resource management process the department is in on for Crown lands. There has been over the years an accumulation of the licensed lands put under those agreements until the requirements are met under the Acts.
The management is defined, it is a forest management plan, and there is cutting management plans, the licensees basically have the right under those plans to build roads and cut trees, but they are subject to 100 per cent approval of the department. They have to produce a plan for their activities and the department has to approve it. There is also an obligation for silviculture. There is an obligation to establish, tend, and grow forest crops on the licensed lands in an efficient, safe and economical manner to replace the woods that are harvested. The wood supply, annual, at the moment Stora is entitled up to 330,000 cords and Kimberly-Clark 50,000 cords. The actual cut is actually less.
The forest utilization licence agreements, that was the second method, that is simply the clause that allows the minister to enter into these agreements with licensees. Under most of these, they were signed up originally to help facilitate the mills in gaining higher lumber recovery, putting better equipment, making those more efficient to saw more lumber out of less forest product. There are a number of them around the province, except for the licensed
areas; we don't have any in the seven eastern counties, but there are approximately 19 or 20 right now on the lands that are available for harvesting. They can overlap. They are volume agreements. The licensee can be required, if they are looking for a specific product then other product that they can't utilize is sometimes moved to another mill during the harvesting operation and it is used against their commitment. A prime example of that would be the Canexel hardboard plant, and sawmill licensees in the western end.
[10:30 a.m.]
The last slide is just to give you a typical year. Last year was kind of an anomaly, the funds for Crown lands were shifted to the tussock moth protection program, but in a normal year, those are the hectares of silviculture work that would be done by Stora, Kimberly-Clark and by the province who takes responsibility for reforestation on the lands that the licensees have access to, the 10 year licence agreement holders.
MR. GRAHAM: Thank you very much, Dan. Another issue that we were advised that your committee was interested in hearing about was the issue of our enforcement program in particular to the aboriginal harvesting. I guess I would preface this presentation by the fact that some of these matters are, in fact, before the court. So, the presentation is a fairly high-level presentation as to what is going on in that particular arena.
The gentleman who was out of the room when I introduced everyone was Chuck Moore, he is the Manager of our Enforcement Program. So he and Mr. Mombourquette will be making this presentation.
MR. JOHN MOMBOURQUETTE: I am going to give a brief overview of the enforcement division and then I will go into the Native harvesting issue. The Enforcement Division comes under Regional Services, our province is broken up into three regions and within those three regions we have 23 area offices, and our Enforcement Division works out of our head office in Halifax.
We have 77 conservation officers. Within that, 33 are assistant conservation officers and within the 33 we have 13 Mi'kmaq officers; we also have a dog section made up of three dogs. We have the highest standards for any enforcement agency or police force in the province. For entrance you have to be a graduate forest technician or fish and wildlife technician and, in addition to that, you have to be a graduate of the Police Academy. We have a special investigative unit; we have undercover operator teams; we have intelligence and surveillance units; we have a special investigative manager; and we do enter into covert operations.
Some of the Statutes and regulations that we enforce are the Angling Act; the Beaches Act, the Crown Lands Act; the Forests Act; the federal Fisheries Act; the Migratory Birds Convention Act; the Wildlife Act; the Provincial Parks Act; the Off-highway Vehicles Act;
the Trails Act; the Canada Shipping Act; the Small Vessel Regulations; and regulations pertaining to federal-provincial sanctuaries, wildlife parks, wildlife management and protected areas.
In addition to that our officers are appointed special constables under the Police Act, under Section 43, and we enforce the Liquor Control Act - we have limited these authorities by appointment, so we don't create another provincial police force - offences relating to firearms, the new federal firearm legislation, anything that our officers would come in contact with on a daily basis, impaired driving, assaulting a police officer - we have the option of going by our legislation or by the Criminal Code - obstructing a peace officer in Section 4(1) for safe storage, display and handling of firearms, and illegal possession under the Controlled Drug and Substance Act.
Now I will move into native harvesting. That just gives you a brief overview of our Enforcement Division and that is a very brief overview. Basically, Section 35, as you are aware, and Section 35(2) of the Constitution, the existing Aboriginal and treaty rights of Aboriginal peoples of Canada are hereby recognized and affirmed, and Aboriginal people is defined as Indian.
Our policies - and I am going to get into our policy - basically come out of B.C., a case in 1990, the Sparrow case and the difference being British Columbia has very few treaties, so what came out of there in 1990 was an Aboriginal right. The only treaties in British Columbia are the Douglas Treaties that were in the mid-1800's, 1850, on Vancouver Island, and one other treaty or so north, but what is different in this is that they recognize this as an Aboriginal right as opposed to a treaty right.
I put this in, and this was taken from a letter that was written in 1910 by the Chief of the Manitoba tribes to Sir Wilfred Laurier, and it basically gives you an overview. You have to be cognizant of where aboriginal people are coming from and this was in a letter that was sent to him in 1910. They say: We find ourselves without any real home in this our own country. Our people are fined and imprisoned for using the same game and fish we were told would always be ours for food. Gradually we are becoming regarded as trespassers over a large portion of this our country.
The courts have been recognizing these decisions across the country, so you have to be aware of where the Aboriginal people are coming from. This line was taken, it was a decision handed down in October 28, 1997, in New Brunswick and the quote was: The trees on Crown land are Indian trees. That was Justice Turnbull of the Court of Queen's Bench of New Brunswick. That is what began the trouble here in Nova Scotia. That decision was handed down in October. We had our first harvest on November 12th and that was in Hants County.
The number of operations would vary. At that time as many as 25 to 100 - basically everyone - headed into the woods and began cutting on Crown land when that decision was handed down in the Province of Nova Scotia. The decision in New Brunswick is not binding on our courts but certainly the way they viewed it, if the decision was in their favour, they would use it here. A lot of the historical information is identical for both provinces.
September 3, 1998, enforcement staff are advised to investigate all operations and charge non-natives involved with the harvest. One of the things that happened and happened with wildlife issues and fish is that a number of non-natives got involved in the issue. At this time we were in negotiations with the Aboriginal people, but we were very quick to go in and put a stop to the non-native . . .
MR. CHAIRMAN: Could you verify if that is September 3rd or if that's March 9th?
MR. MOMBOURQUETTE: Yes, that is September 3, 1998. On November 18th, DNR began charging natives involved in illegal harvesting. To date there have been 44 individuals charged under Section 29(1) of the Crown Lands Act. In addition to that, there has been a couple of charges under the Criminal Code and they are currently before the courts. A number of non-natives were charged. Most of those cases have cleared the courts with convictions in all cases, but to date we have 44.
This is, again, coming out of our policy. We will only recognize Mi'kmaq harvesters as having a Mi'kmaq treaty or Aboriginal right to hunt and fish in the Province of Nova Scotia. We did have an Aboriginal come in from Ontario, a member of the Ojibwa. Immediately when the decision was handed down and he began harvesting down in Shelburne County, we went in and charged him and certainly the court decisions have shown clearly that in order to exercise an Aboriginal right, you would have to show that you were there and this was integral to your community prior to the arrival of the Europeans and clearly he couldn't do that.
So there are only two ways to do it by way of the Constitution. One is the treaty right and in order to prove a treaty right, you must prove that you are a descendent of the people who signed the treaty with government and then to exercise an Aboriginal right you would have to show that that territory was integral to your community, or the practice. So, basically, we went in and charged him. A conviction was entered on May 13th and we seized and forfeited $37,000 worth of wood in that operation so that one is concluded.
Once again, coming back to Sparrow in 1990 what the court recognized was charges relating to public safety and conservation will be enforced against Mi'kmaq harvesters. That is basically taken right out of the decision of Sparrow, it is a landmark decision and a lot of government departments have adopted that statement with regard to developing policies in the province. We go further with the conservation issue, an officer would have to prove by
way of expert evidence that indeed it was a conservation issue. Then with public safety there has never been a decision where the Supreme Court that has disregarded safety.
Wildlife enforcement, our policy right now is dealing with wildlife because we are currently into an enforcement situation on the logging issue. But we do not do wildlife enforcement on Indian reserves. Complaints received concerning any Statutes involved on Indian reserves will be referred to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. When an offence occurs off the reserve and the offender takes refuge on a reserve, the matter is to be referred to the RCMP for assistance and this often happens. Any incidents of threats to any employee or information of possession of weapons will be reported, in writing, within 24 hours to the regional enforcement coordinator.
Conservation officers will investigate all reported Native harvesting on Crown land. All information and requests for direction on Native harvesting will be directed through the regional enforcement coordinator. Actually, this regional enforcement coordinator is a new position within the department. We actually restructured the volume of complaints and occurrences that were going on across the province. It was very difficult for us to keep up with them at head office so we have now appointed a regional enforcement coordinator in each of the regions to handle these inquiries.
The regional enforcement coordinator is to submit a report to my office by 11:00 a.m. each Monday and that outlines the past week Native harvesting activities. In addition to that, any intelligence charges are provided daily. For the most part the harvesting has been shut down across the province. We do have a couple of areas where they still are. You are always going to have some standouts and we are currently addressing them. For the most part, it has gotten fairly quiet across the province.
On April 21st we did have one group who were continuing to harvest and continuing to truck wood so we did a joint operation. We work very closely with the RCMP on these issues and development enforcement plans and strategies. They are signed off by myself and Criminal Operations here in Halifax and they are signed off by our enforcement coordinator and the detachment commander. Basically, we stepped up and seized the tractor trailer, that truck is currently seized and being held at Crown Assets and the load. Again, it shut down the operation and I will get into that. These are not enforcement issues. Enforcement may be used to get these matters before the courts but clearly these are legal issues that you are entering into not directly enforcement issues so it is very difficult.
On April 26th a decision was handed down in favour of the defence's motion for change of venue and one trial to be held in Halifax. They made a motion with regard to a joinder and a change of venue and as a result of that, there are the first 17 informations, there were 30 individuals named on those 17 informations and there may be two others that were missed that may be joined in that one application. So what that means is there will be one trial for those first 30 as it stands now and it may be 32 and that will be heard in Halifax.
Basically with these decisions, as we go into the pre-trial here, we would hope to have an agreed statement of fact come out of that pre-trial session which would basically mean our officers will only be involved in this actual court process; if we are required to give evidence it will be the first week of the trial. It is anticipated this trial will last about 12 to 13 weeks. Our role would be just the first week because basically we only have to prove a prima facie case, which means we have to prove the elements of the offence that one, they were harvesting on Crown land and two, they did not have authority to be there. They are probably willing to agree to that in an agreed statement of fact so it could reduce the impact on our officer's court time as a result of that. The rest of the trial will be tied up with historical evidence. Again, the pre-trial was held on April 21st and I don't have any information with regard to what came out of that. That is a closed-door session, as you are probably aware.
Negotiations. This is a presentation that I did for the RCMP and a number of the slides have been taken out. The negotiations are back on, they are kind of lukewarm; in fact, I believe we are going to be meeting today. Basically what our position has been through this process, recognizing that it is more a legal issue as opposed to an enforcement issue, we have been trying to separate the land claim, which they are piggybacking onto the charges that are going forward in the court. We have been trying to separate that from the woods issue.
Our enforcement strategy developed in consultation with the RCMP; DNR is the lead agency in this matter and will be involved in setting any proactive plan in motion. It will be incumbent upon the RCMP and DNR operation commanders to determine when the RCMP will assume control of an on-site situation. The RCMP's main objective in this will be to prevent breaches of the peace and issues relating to public safety. That is it, thank you.
MR. GRAHAM: Mr. Chairman, there are two points that I would like to elaborate on in the last presentation. One point that was missed in the presentation was that the actual case in New Brunswick was, in fact, overturned by the Supreme Court of Canada. That was kind of around the timing of when the situation went from a monitoring role to where we had to enforce the Crown Lands Act.
The second point. Mr. Mombourquette is correct, the slide did say that negotiations are off. That situation arose when a document was tabled by the 13 Chiefs to the Minister of Aboriginal Affairs in which there was an issue of title on the table. At that point, when the province refused to accept title, the Mi'kmaq closed discussions with the department. As recently as three weeks ago we have now opened formal discussions. They are tripartite with the federal government, DIAND; representatives from the Mi'kmaq Chiefs; and DNR. As was mentioned, we are meeting again this afternoon to see if we can move forward on the file with regard to sorting out access to Crown land.
MR. CHAIRMAN: I would like to thank you for the presentation and we will be going to questions but on the last issue that you mentioned, if we get into questions that you feel are inappropriate or that you can't answer because of the situation, if you would just
indicate that. I am sure the members will try to accommodate you. We are open for questions. Mr. [John] Deveau.
MR. JOHN DEVEAU: Mr. Chairman, my first question is for Nancy, dealing with the Nova Scotia Forest Strategy. It made mention of the Forest Advisory Committee, can you explain to me the make-up, who is involved in the committee and how they became involved?
MS. MCINNIS-LEEK: The committee is at a stage where I have terms of reference. There could be a number of different advisory committees under that advisory committee concept. The one which I referred to in the overheads is our Technical Advisory Committee. The intention is to have people on that committee with an understanding of forestry enforced issues, to assist us, particularly with our need for further developing the implementation of the strategy dealing with code of practice, public comments on the two sets of regulations, and any of the more forestry environmental issues that come up of a technical nature. There may be other groups that we will have to look at that allow for the broader public input. I have not been involved in selecting the committee itself yet. We hope to do that by the fall and have it operational in September.
MR. JOHN DEVEAU: Can I just ask one more question? I would like to move on to Mr. Mombourquette. It just caught my eye rather quickly, your enforcement officers have to be graduates of a police academy?
MR. MOMBOURQUETTE: Yes.
MR. JOHN DEVEAU: So they can carry firearms?
MR. MOMBOURQUETTE: That is correct. Yes, they meet the same standards as all police officers in the Province of Nova Scotia.
MR. JOHN DEVEAU: Thank you.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Balser.
MR. GORDON BALSER: Mr. Eidt, there has been concern that the level of harvesting exceeds the inventory of trees, I guess. Is there truth in that? Are we over-harvesting our forest resources? It seems that in terms of the wilderness protection Act and when the Forests Act came forward, there was a great deal of discussion around that issue.
MR. EIDT: I think Nancy could speak better for the province as a whole, but on the Crown lands we are not in terms of total forest product. We do have some regional shortages for specific product materials. The most notable would be saw logs.
MR. BALSER: What about in terms of the entire province then, Nancy?
MS. MCINNIS-LEEK: In terms of the entire province, we have been doing two things in the last year to try to help us assess that more clearly. One thing is to identify, through the Registry of Buyers, what the actual level of harvest is in a very accurate way. We have recently completed that and have numbers which we will be releasing very shortly on the amount of harvest. At the same time, we have been using our abilities to assess wood supply - supply and demand - and we have a model that does that for us. We also have more precise inventory data than we have had before and those three elements we have put together to look at a supply and demand scenario. We will actually be releasing the results of those publicly in another two weeks.
Generally speaking what we have found is that the harvest levels, in particular, have declined slightly from the peak in 1997, in terms of 1998 numbers, but that there is likely still to be, in terms of distribution of harvest, much more harvest on private land in terms of the changeover time.
I don't think it is, overall, a broad provincial level. We are probably in a better situation than we had expected to find ourselves, but in terms of distribution across land tenure, in terms of distribution of harvest or demand on a regional basis, it may not be as we would like to see it and that is why we are developing the forest strategy and silviculture plans to take care of those potential issues and how to balance it and ensure we have adequate wood supply everywhere.
MR. BALSER: In the area that I represent, Digby-Annapolis, there is a great deal of concern about the amount of raw log product that seems to be leaving the province. Is there a way in which that is being monitored, or is there a move to curtail that activity?
MS. MCINNIS-LEEK: There has been concern, broadly, about exports from the province for some time. We have been monitoring the amount of exported product that leaves Nova Scotia. We have been monitoring where it goes and how it is used, we have been monitoring the type of product it is, whether it be saw logs or pulp or somewhere in between.
One of the things you have seen in Annapolis County is a lot of wood going directly to New Brunswick; that has existed for about five years. When it began to be noticed, it was primarily pulpwood, and the reason for that was that there was no market for pulpwood in that part of the province. In order to be able to harvest at all it made it necessary to export. Now we also see more saw logs being exported.
The export tends to be within a normal range of about 10 per cent to 15 per cent of our overall harvest. It hasn't skyrocketed, it hasn't changed perceptibly in the last five or six years. It is higher than it was 20 years ago. There are a number of reasons for that; now wood moves also into the province as well as out of the province. We are part of a supply region that includes the eastern United States, Quebec, New Brunswick, Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, and wood moves freely according to the types of quality that the industry
requires, which are much tighter today than they were. The size and dimensions of logs, the type of species, all of those things make it better for the industry to be able to select over a broader area.
Also the availability of trees in the region, given the region is relatively geographically small, when you have dips and such, that region sort of tends to fill those so that you don't experience those shortages. That is one of the reasons for the export and we do not see it as a problem. It is something we are monitoring through the Registry of Buyers. We are very sure of our numbers and keep an eye on it.
MR. GEORGE ARCHIBALD: I have had, for the first time ever, people calling me and saying, look, there are too many trees being cut, this clear-cutting. I guess the calls result after the people have driven from Kentville to Yarmouth and back. They say, look, we are seeing just huge areas of clear-cut ground. I don't know what to tell them. I don't know how many trees are being cut now compared to before. You just indicated that it is sustainable and everything else, but I have noticed in the last year a lot more clear-cutting than I did last year or the year before or anytime.
MS. MCINNIS-LEEK: I sort of alluded to it, to some extent, when I said about the switch between different land tenures. What you have seen over the last three to four years, particularly, is a fairly large increase of harvest on private lands, previously small woodlots. Most of those lands tend to be adjacent highways, whereas the industrial land, Crown land, some of the other land tenures we have been harvesting off historically have been back away, they have not been as visible. Also, because of the issue being raised in the public eye, I think we are all looking and noticing more than we had before. We are seeing more of the trucks that we didn't notice before. So, it is much more visible.
There is more wood coming off small private lands than there has been for some time. Part of the reason for that is because the prices have been good and when you are dealing with private land, as the optional landholder, when they want to sell, like any of us, when the prices are good is maybe the best time to do so. So we have seen a lot of the resource being harvested in large areas where we haven't before.
Those are the reasons why but when you tally them up on the provincial level, it balances out. But when you look at it in certain groups, in certain regions, also the accessibility of that land in areas where the mills are, the users are, you see more pressure.
MR. ARCHIBALD: What sort of assurance do we have that when we do see large sections of private land being cut that the people are going to practice good reforestation and, in fact, there will be a sustainable forest in that place so that they can cut it down again in 40 years or so?
MS. MCINNIS-LEEK: We have been trying to grapple with that for some time. As you are probably well aware, in Nova Scotia most of the lands, 70 per cent or 75 per cent, is under private land ownership. We have been clearly instructed by the public, by the Legislature, not to interfere with public rights in terms of when they wish to harvest. So it has left us really with the options of developing, for instances, what is a good code of practice, what is a good forest practice that you can implement.
We have also tried through the wood acquisition plans to develop a motivation or an incentive for people to do silviculture, to create the responsibility among the users of the round wood or users of the primary products, the registered buyers, to give them the responsibility for ensuring that the wood they use is replaced. We have a fairly extensive education and extension program to try to work with woodlot owners to encourage them to ensure that their land is reforested, that they are able to meet their own goals and objectives for that land as well. It is a multi-prong approach and it is one we feel will work but it will require a lot of cooperation on the part of the forest industry, individual woodlot owners and all, to believe it is worthwhile to manage their forests sustainably so that there will be opportunities for multiple uses.
MR. ARCHIBALD: On Crown land throughout the Province of Nova Scotia, are you practising good silviculture, is it as good as you would like or is the province somewhat limited in the amount of silviculture work that can actually be done on Crown land to enhance and encourage better stands of growth?
MR. EIDT: We have sufficient funding to look after the areas that are harvested, perhaps not in every year but on average, over a period of time we have managed to make sure that all the areas that are harvested either come back naturally and they are properly tended or if they fail to come back naturally, are planted and attended to. There are some areas of silvi-junk from way back that would be nice to attend but they tend to be in remote areas and we can't afford to access all of those areas. That is taken into consideration in our sustainable cut figures in our allocation of wood.
MR. ARCHIBALD: When you are talking to different landowners, private operators, sometimes they - I don't know any more about cutting trees than a chipmunk, really - I know a little bit about dairy farming and other things but when I am travelling through the woods with private contractors, many of them have said, look, and they will show you what they are doing for reforestation and thinning and pruning and this sort of thing. They say, this is what the province should be doing on Crown land but they are not. But apparently that is not true?
MR. EIDT: I take the number of complaints every year, this is the best way I can answer this, and 99 per cent of the time in the last 10 years what we are seeing is that there are contractors that work in the province for the forest industry and some of that forest industry has licensed lands but they also tend to do a lot of their own custom logging on small private lands and on other industrial lands. There is a tendency for people when they see them
harvesting to assume they are working on Crown land, because 99 per cent of the time when we go out and look at complaints, we usually find that the complaint was about private holdings that they believe to have been Crown. There is an awful lot of private land in the province that is assumed to be provincial Crown land and it is not.
I am not trying to pass the blame here but that is what we usually find, that Crown land is attended to on a schedule. We wait two years for the hylobius beetle, we do an assessment for natural regeneration; if planting is required, then we follow up with the planting or we allow the natural regeneration to come through, if it is sufficient, and then we follow up with spacing operations. So we are able, on the Crown land, to make sure that those areas that have been harvested are coming back adequately.
[11:00 a.m.]
MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Parker.
MR. CHARLES PARKER: Dan, first of all, on Crown lands. I guess the complaint I hear most often on Crown lands is lack of access by sawmills. You mentioned there are 20 or 21 mills other than the two big pulp mills that have access at this time, but there are a lot of small operators out there that would love to have access in their county or their area to timber, but it is all tied up. How can they go about getting some access to Crown lands in their general vicinity?
MR. EIDT: The allocations on Crown land are at the limits of sustainability, so it is very difficult to find surplus material without over-harvesting. I have to be honest here, I guess this basically occurred with the setting aside of the wilderness areas. We had traditionally made about 20 per cent of the volume available through that tender method that I explained earlier and there were 50 to 60 tenders every year. More recently we haven't been able to let that number of tenders because of our existing commitment level, that with setting aside of the wilderness areas, were just at that sustainable level, and to allow more access would mean over-cutting.
MR. PARKER: So every 10 years, or 5 years, whatever, are they re-tendered? Will new people have access to tender on a new piece of property?
MR. EIDT: The licence and management agreements come up periodically. Not the licence and management agreements, the area agreements are essentially evergreen agreements, but the 10-year licence and management, the licence agreements, they come up periodically for renewal every 10 years.
MR. PARKER: Are they wide open to go to the highest bidder or who gets those tenders? Do they go back to the same company that had them before?
MR. EIDT: Typically the province has allocated them to mills that were trying to increase in efficiency for increased lumber recovery, which means that they need less wood to produce a certain amount of lumber. There is an implicit expectation by those mill owners that they will be able to continue on their long-term plans, so they hope to be able to renew those licence agreements.
MR. PARKER: One method, I understand, that they issue licences, is - and I know New Brunswick is doing this - is based on, like a value-added production. Crown lands will go to companies that are making the most jobs out of the equal amount of fibre, or whatever. Have you thought about doing that here in Nova Scotia, tying the Crown leases to companies that provide the most finished product made here in Nova Scotia?
MR. EIDT: That certainly is a consideration when these licences are issued and probably will be more so in the future, similar to New Brunswick.
MR. PARKER: It seems to make sense because we are employing more Nova Scotians and not using the resources as fast. It is not being shipped out in a raw product and, like I said, other provinces, other jurisdictions, are doing that.
MR. EIDT: I would expect to see us pointed in that direction in Nova Scotia as well.
MR. GRAHAM: If I may, Mr. Parker, the licensing or the agreements that you're referring to are volume-based; there are only two that are land-based. For example, if an individual wishes to have access to wood within those agreements, we have worked with the licence holders to accommodate additional requirements within those land bases. The remaining are volume-based, so it depends to a large extent on just how much volume is, in fact, available to us and that all depends then on what we refer to as the working forest.
As was indicated earlier, the Crown owns 26 per cent of the land base and not all that is what we would consider to be our working forest. So we try to accommodate as best we can individuals seeking small volumes but, basically, as Mr. Eidt has indicated, we are at our capacity with regard to anyone new coming into the system and saying they would like 20 million board feet, or something like that.
MR. PARKER: What about access to species maybe that the company is not presently using, or may never use; for example, hardwoods on Crown land that are leased maybe to Stora. There are small mills, furniture makers and others who would like to have access to some hardwood, and maybe the pulp company doesn't need that type of fibre. Is it possible to sub-lease that or how can they make arrangements to get access?
MR. EIDT: We are open to that. In fact, Stora is open to that as well. They have arrangements with several small entrepreneurs that are utilizing high quality hardwood. A stumbling block has been forest management though. It is the high percentage of low quality
material for which we have not had a proposal yet to utilize that material sufficiently. So there are a limited number of stands that we can actually operate in on a sustainable basis and it is somewhat dependent on market for low quality wood. We would like to see that low quality manufactured in the province, on Crown lands.
MR. PARKER: Some jurisdictions, and I know Quebec is one, I think they actually lease out their land based on species in some areas or based on different licences on the same land going to different owners?
MR. EIDT: The licensees do that as well. When they carry out a harvesting operation on these area-based agreements, the other forest products are made available to other mills. Both Stora and Kimberly-Clark exchange a lot of saw log and stud wood for chips and other arrangements.
MR. PARKER: The resource is owned by the primary lessee, I guess, and then they sell it or otherwise dispose of it?
MR. EIDT: They have a right to it, yes.
MR. PARKER: Even though they don't actually use it in their own operation.
MR. EIDT: And I think you will probably see them, in the future, doing some exchange of hardwood products for softwood chips as well.
MR. PARKER: Can I ask a second question, Mr. Chairman? To Nancy - and Mr. Archibald brought this up - I know in the area of Nova Scotia I come from, in Pictou County and eastern Nova Scotia, it is just so obvious that there is tremendous over-harvesting and you don't need to drive along the Trans Canada. You can go on any secondary road throughout my county and it is blatantly obvious that there is just a tremendous amount of fibre, trees being cut down, and a lot of that land is not being replanted. It is private land, and it goes to the highest bidder, quite often out-of-province, and nothing is being done with it. In my community I see a lot of acreage where they just came in and took the resource and nothing is happening. I know you are working on plans and we have got to change that, but at this moment there is nothing being done and how do you see it changing?
MS. MCINNIS-LEEK: One thing that is important to notice is that Cumberland County, Pictou County and Antigonish County have been areas where there has been a lot of harvesting pressure, particularly the last three years. That's why you see so much because the ages of wood was just ripe for harvest in comparison to other areas.
One of the other things is that when you harvest, you don't immediately replant. Natural regeneration is something we encourage in the department. It is also something that works very well in most parts of Nova Scotia. So you may see a delay in time between when
a harvest occurs and when you will see visible trees. A lot of the techniques we use today will hide the trees for some time until they are quite high. So you may not notice unless you're actually walking on the site. So there is natural regeneration, natural regrowth going on. Not all the areas need to be replanted.
There are a lot of people who are managing their forests and they look like nothing is being done, but actually they are looking at management at different stages to achieve that. In terms of now, we do have silviculture assistance which does encourage small landowners to take various management techniques and apply them to their own land. Those are occurring.
Often, a lot of the forest management is not very visible. The harvest is the most visible by far. A lot of the other things that go on in the forest are not quite as visible, either the results of them or the actual activity itself, although there is a lot of work going on at this present time. Whether it is going on to the extent we need it in the area you are talking about is one of the things we have had concern about and will continue to encourage landowners and contractors and such to take care of the forests in those areas.
MR. PARKER: It is an education process, and hopefully the department has the extension people that will talk with landowners and show them there is a better way, but regardless I still see a lot of land, several years after harvest that is just growing up in poplar and other junk species, it is not being replanted.
I also wanted to ask you about the wood acquisition plan and the Registry of Buyers. I guess the onus is on the buyer to make sure that he is buying from property that is sustainably managed. Who is going to monitor that or who is going to be in touch with the buyer or with the landowner to make sure that that is being followed?
MS. MCINNIS-LEEK: The way we hope to implement the wood acquisition plan is to work with individuals or companies, who are registered buyers who are the end-users of the product through the wood acquisition plan to assign them responsibility for ensuring that the amount of silviculture and the type of silviculture that needs to be done in the province is taking place. They will have to prove that they do a certain amount of silviculture or have ensured that it happens. Part of the reporting of that will be telling us where this silviculture actually takes place, what type and where, and based on that the department will be monitoring to ensure that the activity that is claimed to happen does take place, that the activity that does take place is done properly and is focused on the type of results that we see as important.
I guess it is important to stress that we do not control and monitor harvest per se, we do not have any control over the harvest activity, our focus is on the post-harvest and the pre-harvest activities of silviculture and management. We feel those are adequate, we base it on the amount of harvest that is happening in the province. We have looked at that level of
activity to determine how much silviculture and what type is needed. We will monitor to ensure that is happening. If it isn't, then we will have to adjust the program, have to adjust our legislation to ensure it does happen.
MR. PARKER: If you have proof that an individual buyer is absolutely not buying from sustainable lands or is not following the regulations, are there penalties for that buyer? Would he lose his registration?
MS. MCINNIS-LEEK: Yes, in the Forests Act amendments we have added fairly substantial penalties. There are two types of penalties, one is a normal enforcement penalty associated with fines and jail time, so to speak, if the Act or any of the regulations associated with the Forests Act are violated. The other is, as you have mentioned, that we have the ability to take away a registered buyers registration status, and in the Forests Act amendments it makes it an offence to buy wood if you are not a registered buyer in good standing. Once those elements come into force through the Act amendments, that is the second type of penalty associated with that.
The people that targets are the registered buyers and there are a lot of other wood buyers in between as well. The registered buyer isn't required to do the work on the land they initially harvested, they will be required to do work on an equivalent area. So it may not be the land they harvested from that they are personally responsible for.
MR. PARKER: Okay. I will pass. Maybe I will have some other questions later.
MR. CHAIRMAN: I just want to ask a quick question if I could. When I go back to what has been said, I think Mr. Mombourquette or Mr. Eidt said that the fact of the matter is that the Crown land is pretty well fully committed as it is now. Is that a correct statement?
MR. EIDT: For softwood products it is. There is some underutilization of hardwood products and in particular the lower quality hardwood.
MR. CHAIRMAN: The reason I am asking that, I wouldn't mind having an indication, if we are at that level and a lot of the mills, perhaps even some of the larger customers that you have in the eastern counties and so forth are dependent on access to this land, the obvious question is how much is being harvested by the Native community? I know it is just starting. Is this still just a small problem or is it starting to accumulate to a bigger problem?
Without getting into specifics I think, you or someone mentioned that there were 25 to 100 logging operations as of April. Has that number grown, has it stabilized? We are just trying to get an indication as to what level of harvesting has taken place.
MR. EIDT: Right at this time, it is pretty minimal. In the long term, in the growth and yield of the forest, one year's cut may have not been that significant. We will still have to do an analysis to check that out, but I am not expecting great repercussions from the harvest that took place over the long term. It is significant in the year that it happened. Most of it was bought by Nova Scotia companies, but it does affect the ability; those trees that were harvested, obviously, cannot now form part of a sawmill's commitment.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Obviously, if they were harvesting, they would probably look for the best stands. You are not going to be taking the worst stands, you would be taking some of the better ones. Is that a fair assessment?
MR. EIDT: Well, that's where the best economic return is.
MR. CHAIRMAN: That's right. Was it located in certain areas rather than others?
MR. EIDT: No, it was more or less evenly dispersed across the province.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Balser.
MR. BALSER: You may have touched on this but the Forests Act was debated and passed and it has not been proclaimed to date. When do you expect that to happen? I guess the follow up would be, why? Since it seems to me that the tone of that Act was to put in place a philosophy of sustainable forest management practices and so on.
MR. GRAHAM: If I may, you are quite correct, the Act was passed and it has not been proclaimed. The reason it has not been proclaimed is being the enabling legislation that it is, there are certain requirements identified in the Act that unless the regulations are in place it becomes an unenforceable piece of legislation. For example, there are requirements in there with regard to the wood acquisition plan, which if they are not articulated in regulation, people would come and they would just say we are meeting the requirements of the wood acquisition plan by just putting in a single piece of paper saying we are going to cut, you know, carrying it to the nth degree. So, the reason and the advice we received from our solicitors, which formed the cornerstone of our decision, was that in fact by proclaiming the Act prior to at least the regulations being in a public domain for discussion would make it almost an unenforceable piece of legislation. That is what we were advised.
We have been working on putting together the regulations and, as indicated in the first presentation, we will be starting the public review of those, as required by the legislation, in early June and have that completed by early July. So, during that time-frame is when we hope to be looking forward for some legal counsel again with regard to proclamation of the Act.
MR. BALSER: With the protected areas legislation, a fair amount of Crown land would be removed from harvesting, I guess, particularly my area, with the Tobeatic and there are a number of larger sawmills who, I think, had a view towards accessing that. What is being done to make up the difference? For example, Irving Woodlands has a fairly big sawmill in my area and I do believe their long-range strategy prior to the protected areas Act was to try and access products from that area. What plan is in place to make up the difference for companies like that or is there one?
MR. EIDT: Well, we are just going to have to be very careful about our future allocations and we are going to have to make sure that adequate silviculture investments are made on the areas that are harvested to continue on, but it will be difficult to make any increase to allocations from Crown lands, if not impossible, in some regions of the province. There are lots of people who would like to expand and have bigger mills and more wood but that is not realistic. The area base will only just grow so much wood that can be made available and we have other commitments like nature reserves, wilderness areas, with forest wildlife guidelines; we are very much under a lot of pressure for sustainable forests and we wish to accommodate and provide sustainable forests, not just sustainable yields. So, the way Crown land is now managed and laid out and planned for harvest, it all has a little bit of an impact on the amount of wood that is available but it should help to make sure that it is public land that Nova Scotians can be proud of in the way it is managed.
MR. BALSER: In terms of averaging, if there is a block of Crown land that is protected, does that mean that other areas that are not protected will have increased pressure? If you look at the overall figure, I would think that on average you have a lot of under-harvested wood here and you have another area where it has been maybe over-harvested or harvested to a greater extent. If you look at the average, it balances out. So I guess the question would be, does protecting certain areas mean that there will be increased pressure on other areas that aren't protected?
MR. EIDT: Yes. If there is a certain capacity that exists that was dependent on a total land base of a certain amount of extraction and silviculture input and some of it is now no longer available for forestry, yes. It means there will be more demand on the remaining area and there will probably be more intensive forest management on the remaining area as well.
MR. BALSER: Thank you.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Parker.
MR. PARKER: Mr. Chairman, I would like to come to the issue of silviculture investment in our woodlands here in Nova Scotia. It is something that's varied and it seems to be different for each area of Nova Scotia. There are different companies that have different silvicultural incentives for landowners and it is not uniform within the province. Also the amount of dollars that the province has put into silviculture has been going down and down
and down. I guess that's my first question. Is the province committed to holding its own at least or increasing the amount of silviculture that is invested in Nova Scotia woodlands?
MR. GRAHAM: On the budget side we are hopeful that we will at least retain the funding we had for 1998-99.
MR. PARKER: Which was $3 million on private land?
MR. GRAHAM: Yes, $3 million on private land. As to what may be in the current budget, I cannot really comment on that, I don't think.
MR. PARKER: Do you feel $3 million is adequate to meet the needs of the program?
MR. GRAHAM: The $3 million that we have on the private land program, we use that funding to leverage funding from both the industry and the private landowner. Ideally, it would be nice to have more funding for the private land program and to answer your question, no, we don't think $3 million is enough so we have been making overtures. We will have to wait to see what comes out of the Budget Speech, but we have been using our funding to leverage, as I have indicated, both private and industrial funding. The policy within the department has been that we are prepared to fund - looking at $6 a cord price - one-third of that. So in other words, if we have $3 million in our budget, we should be able to leverage a total of $9 million from the other industries.
You are quite right, the arrangements that are out there, we are not forcing anyone to set up any diehard particular arrangement. We are trying to leave that to the industry and to the private landowners to sort out as to which best arrangement is available or suited to them. There are some arrangements out there which the government is not part of, in that they did not want funding from the department to be involved. There is other funding out there where they wanted more than the one-third, but we've stuck to the one-third. There are individuals with sawmills, there are agreements with sawmills, there are agreements with pulp mills and others.
We have been trying to budget and we have budgeted that funding we had last year as equitably as possible across the province because there is also a segment of the private landowners who wish to participate as private landowners. They don't want any part of an agreement with the industry. They wish to basically conduct their silviculture on their land and come direct to the government for funding. The current rate, which will stay that way for the current year, is 80 per cent. So it is 80 cent dollars. If they spend $100 on the planting operation, we will contribute $80 to that operation. So you are quite right, there is a variety there.
MR. PARKER: I guess the complaint I have heard from some is that it is tied to the industry, whether it's MacTara or Stora, or whatever. But the industry objective certainly is to produce fibre, whether it's pulpwood or logs, and to the neglect of certain species that could be used for other purposes, like hardwood land management. So are there any plans to maybe have a policy province-wide, that would be more uniform for woodlot owners and also look at hardwood management in particular so they could manage their lands for those and still get some assistance on those lands?
MR. GRAHAM: We have tried to and we have regionalized the treatments, but also, given the tight dollars we have and the impact of the harvesting in order to assure sustainability, when we do our various model runs, there are certain treatments that have a bigger impact than others, so as a result we basically have directed our funding to those, for example, starting from the establishment of a new forest right through to the tending and the harvesting of that forest. In eastern Nova Scotia, we have focused on that aspect of it; in western Nova Scotia and other parts of the province, we have turned to and allowed treatments that are outside of that, where landowners wish to increase the value of their product be it hardwood or another form or species.
We are open to those ideas, but it is more of a case-by-case nature rather than a blanket policy because in some areas the individuals are not interested in the hardwood, it is more of a by-product from harvesting the softwood, and then it becomes a marketing issue. As indicated earlier, private landowners pretty well set their own schedule as to when they harvest and to whom they may sell their wood. We are trying to make it a little bit more . . .
MR. PARKER: Just as an example, one woodlot owner in eastern Nova Scotia said if he wanted to cut all his woods down and replant, there is assistance - I think it was $1,200 a hectare, whatever figure he mentioned to me - to start a new forest. It would be a monoculture at that time, but if he wanted to go in and selectively harvest his wood and do some improvements to his lot, there was no help for him. There is a disincentive to try to look after his lot and improve it with a small harvest every five years or whatever he wanted to take out of it, but there was lots of help if he wanted to cut it all down at once.
MR. EIDT: You can undertake that treatment; I wouldn't say anybody is being prohibited from doing it, they can do it. The initial entry into those stands is sometimes expensive, and I expect that is where they are looking for a little bit of assistance, but once you get it going it tends to pay for itself by thinnings or selective cuts. There is a little bit of funding available for that, in particular the tolerant hardwoods. Unfortunately as Dan was pointing out, it is the softwood supply - hardwood is actually on the increase in the province in the inventories - it is trying to maintain that softwood supply that is the problem for the industry because, as I mentioned before, it is not just Crown lands where there is an underutilization of hardwood, it is also on private lands.
It is a little bit difficult to put a lot of money into growing hardwoods. When they are growing, while they are increasing in amount I believe, and there isn't an industry that is utilizing it to the extent that it is available, so that is a bit difficult. We do put a certain percentage of the money toward that, especially the tolerant hardwood stands where selective cuts could be undertaken.
MR. PARKER: Maybe I heard him incorrectly. He thought there was no assistance if he wanted to do selective management, to go in and thin and clean out his woodlot as compared to cutting it all down and replanting.
MR. EIDT: That may be one where he has to participate as Dan suggested as an individual willing to put in, we are funding 80 per cent and they are funding 20 per cent; that may be the option there, he may not be able to get that from a forest industry company.
MR. PARKER: Okay. Something, you would consider at this point. Thank you.
MR. EIDT: To a certain extent, yes.
MR. CHAIRMAN: I will ask a question of Mr. Mombourquette. You said you had 77 enforcement officers. Is that number up or down from 10 years ago?
MR. MOMBOURQUETTE: When we restructured the enforcement division back in about 1987, the number would be done as far as actual bodies go, but if you look at the effort in person years, you would see a dramatic increase in delivery.
MR. CHAIRMAN: . . . versus full time to part time, is that what you are referring to?
MR. MOMBOURQUETTE: Basically, prior to 1987, if you had 10 technicians in an area office, all of them did some enforcement. What it may add up to in reality is two full person years. If you go in that office now, where we have specialized and increased the standards in the training level of our officers, you would probably have four person years. So there has actually been an increase in enforcement effort, but reduced numbers.
MR. CHAIRMAN: So there are fewer people altogether involved in enforcement?
MR. MOMBOURQUETTE: Actually there are fewer people involved in the program.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Does that hurt in the sense that you have fewer eyes out in the field? I think a lot of the times, if you look in the past in the Department of Natural Resources, I know a lot of the people that I have dealt with in the past, maybe they weren't as professional as perhaps you are outlining, but they had a very good knowledge base of what was going on, perhaps even more so than today. Most of them grew up in the area and if anything happened they were the first ones to know it, whereas if someone takes a position
in Yarmouth and doesn't come from Yarmouth, they don't have that knowledge base or that network that would be available to someone who has been there 20 years or 30 years or whatever. Most of them came from the forestry before and if anybody is doing anything out of the way, they were the first ones to know. Is that a fair assessment or not?
[11:30 a.m.]
MR. MOMBOURQUETTE: I think we still have the eyes out there. All of our staff are still appointed Conservation Officers so they do have limited authority and they still gather information and pass it on to the enforcement staff. With regard to the enforcement staff, all of our officers still would have 10-plus years in the areas they are working in. If you look at the average age of our officers, it is about 42 years of age and most of them have been in an area in excess of 10 years with the exception of probably three officers.
From a community policing perspective, we are probably ahead of most enforcement agencies. In addition to that, we recently seconded one of our officers to the Criminal Intelligence Service of Canada, which is the first time in the history of Canada that a Wildlife Officer has gone over to that organization. What we have found out is that it is not just what we could gather, as far as having someone as far as intelligence goes from our division being over there, it was the information that they could gain from our department as a result of our officers being in particular communities and growing up in those communities. Again, with the forestry background requirement, our enforcement people still come from the forest industry, so they have to have that background also.
MR. CHAIRMAN: I would like to ask a question to Nancy McInnis-Leek if I could, please. Mr. Balser asked the question as to whether or not we are over-harvesting in Nova Scotia. I will be candid, we are hearing different information from you as witnesses today than what we are hearing from the industry. On two other occasions we have had people come before the committee and this being in the field. You make mention that you don't feel that we are over-harvesting both on Crown lands and on private lands but do you keep figures of what the annual harvest is and whether or not those numbers have increased, let's say over the last 2 years, 5 years or 10 years? Maybe you can give us a little bit of an oversight as to what is going on?
MS. MCINNIS-LEEK: The harvest between about 1993 and 1997, increased significantly. It increased from about 4 million cubic metres solid to about 6.5 million in 1997. What we have found most recently is that the levels we are seeing, we haven't absolutely finalized our 1998 numbers as we make sure there are absolutely no errors in the database and such, but we are very sure that the numbers will be less than 1997. They look more like 1996 numbers and that reflects what the industry itself has been telling us. The harvesting really responds to the level of demand of the products that are produced. When there is a change in the pulp industry there is a change in harvesting and when there is a change in the sawmill industry there is a change in harvesting.
What we have seen over the last number of years that spurred the increase was a combination of the pulp mills being in very good economic times and operating at full capacity, at the same time there was increased opportunity for the industry in Nova Scotia to export their wood to the United States because of some natural disasters that combined with, on their side, an industry that was in decline and couldn't meet the demand. That gave an excessive opportunity to Canada, in particular, to ship product into the United States at very good prices. That translated down into wood prices, it translated down into Nova Scotia and as a result, we harvested a lot more, particularly looking for sawlogs.
Because that situation has changed and the economics, the dollars between Canada and the United States have changed, the sawmill industry themselves have found that in the last year they couldn't afford to ship product at the prices that were being offered in the United States market quite like they had been before. That shift itself, in combination with the pulp mill industry that has become more efficient, it has also changed considerably in the last five years. It is working more with the sawmill industry to be more efficient in the utilization of product. Those have combined to reduce the demand overall for local primary forest products like the roundwood chips. That was expected and you could see that it was going to happen. If it had continued to go up we would have been surprised. I suspect we won't see another peak like 1997 for some time, until the industry itself begins to expand again for other economic reasons.
MR. CHAIRMAN: I am a layperson in the forest industry, but I look in our areas and the sawmills that have been established there, I really haven't seen a whole lot of slowdown since 1997 and if anything there has been no change whatsoever. Whether western Nova Scotia is a different example from other areas, I really don't know, but the cutting is still going on and whether or not . . .
MS. MCINNIS-LEEK: It is still going on, and it depends on the size of industry. In western Nova Scotia you still have a lot of small sawmills that have been keeping fairly steady pace. You have a few large ones, it only takes a few of the larger industries to change their production to make a big impact on the numbers. Much of the change has been in your medium and large size sawmills that are involved in a very large export market. A lot of the medium and small ones are involved mostly in local markets and that is fairly steady.
What you are seeing is an industry that doesn't seem to be changing a lot, whether it goes up or down, but in terms of if you look at the number of shifts that some of the larger mills have had on, their expansion or their demand overall, that has shifted. Those numbers that we have, the numbers that we get on harvest come directly from the forest industry and they come under a regulation that is law that requires them to report to us accurately what those numbers are. They have to report to us what wood they harvest, whether it is hardwood, softwood, what county it comes from and what land tenure in that county it comes from.
MR. CHAIRMAN: May I ask you a question then? You are saying that the export market hasn't increased and it has basically been 10 per cent. Who forces anybody to report to you what they have exported, because obviously New Brunswick mills aren't going to be reporting to you what they are buying here, or do they?
MS. MCINNIS-LEEK: It is law in Nova Scotia that if you are an exporter and export Nova Scotia wood you are required to register. We have 77 exporters, at least 25 of those are outside of the Province of Nova Scotia and they report to us their volumes.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Under which Act is that?
MS. MCINNIS-LEEK: It is under the Forests Act and it is under a piece of regulation called the Registration and Statistical Returns, the Registry of Buyers.
MR. CHAIRMAN: One last question if I could, to Mr. Mombourquette. You were saying that the Native cutting is down considerably from what it was. Right now, just to give us a picture, how many areas are being cut right now? Give us an example, an approximation.
MR. MOMBOURQUETTE: We currently have approximately three different areas, it is kind of interestingly broken into three regions. We have one site in Cape Breton where there is not a whole lot of harvesting going on but there is some wood on-site. We have one area in Pictou County where again there is no harvesting going on, there hasn't been for a number of months, but there is a fair bit of wood on-site. There is an area in the central region of the province where we seized a tractor trailer, again there is no harvesting going on at present, but there is still a large volume of wood that is on the site. And then we have one area down in the western region.
Actually we basically have three areas that are still active, but for the most part the amount of wood being harvested right now or being transported, we have eliminated the trucking. As you would appreciate they were using non-Natives to truck this wood and non-Natives to ship the wood out to get the wood roadside, and we have eliminated that. In addition to that, we have eliminated the market basically as to where they can sell the wood. That has seen a dramatic decrease in the amount of harvesting that is taking place.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Parker.
MR. PARKER: I wanted to ask either Dan or Nancy, the big concern out there is certainly over-harvesting that I hear about, it is also very much around the method of harvesting, which is clear-cutting, when you see acres and acres of it being cut down and miles and miles of it as you are driving by. In clear-cutting, everything is cut, the mature tree, the smaller tree, right down to the last toothpick pretty near. Immature trees are really being cut before they are ready, before they should be, when you cut everything, or on land that everything is cut there are certainly trees that are not mature, being harvested.
Is there any plan to address that? I know years ago we had the small tree Act, people were not allowed to cut immature trees. What is being done today to address that issue?
MS. MCINNIS-LEEK: We have been looking at that as part of our forest strategy. I guess in terms of the harvesting, to clarify one point, when Mr. LeBlanc mentioned about not over-harvesting (Interruption), but there is a lot of pressure on small private lands. In terms of small private lands, there is a lot of difference in terms of the distribution of age in stands but we do have an awful lot of forest stands that are very similar in age and those are the ones that are economical to cut in large groups or clear-cuts.
We have been looking at, well, what is a mature forest and what isn't and trying to define that. There are two types of maturity that you have to look at when you are looking at trees. One is reproductive maturity. The other might be looked at as what we call mean annual increment, when it stops growing. Those, often, in tree species are different ages. We felt that the real issue has to be looked at in terms of what that causes. One, we're trying to ensure that we are replanting so we are not interfering with trees, cutting them down at a point when they can't reproduce naturally, and there are a number of methods other than clear-cutting that are used to do that, such as seed tree cuts, and even shelter wood cuts also help with that.
In terms of the mean annual increment, many of the trees, that's sort of their economic maturity. That may be in some cases younger than the reproductive maturity. We have looked at that in terms of whether that's an impact or not and how that affects the age distribution of the forest for wildlife habitat, for aesthetics and such. We are trying to encourage a broader age-class distribution with the forest strategy and we are achieving that. In terms of cutting down small trees, one of the things that happens and we try to encourage on areas which are being clear-cut, is the leaving of wildlife corridors, the leaving of clumps of trees to encourage wildlife habitat, to also look at different ways of cutting soft and you will see not every single stick is cut unless the age of the stand was such. You will see hardwoods are often left. You will see different types of trees left on-site.
Forest management is not always as straightforward as it seems. It is not just sort of cut and grow. There are a lot of management techniques that are not really visible often to us when we see them left standing, but they are there for a purpose and the maturity question is not really affecting whether we have trees that will regrow or whether we have a volume that we can sustain, but we are monitoring that. That is one of the questions, when I mentioned about the harvest information we had hoped to find out with that, is whether the age of the tree that is being cut is too young for either the economic conditions or for the reproductive conditions, or for the age distribution we hope to achieve in terms of the forests.
MR. PARKER: I guess you're working towards an educational solution with people and trying to educate them that there is a better way to do it.
MS. MCINNIS-LEEK: Yes, and to allow for a lot of different management schemes, not just clear-cutting. Clear-cutting does suit certain types of forests and there is no other economical way.
MR. PARKER: . . . white Spruce, balsam fir and so on that need a clear-cut . . .
MS. MCINNIS-LEEK: Yes, that's right, but where there are other opportunities we would like to encourage them and help people identify when those exist.
MR. PARKER: The difficulty still out there is people are cutting immature wood and it is a problem.
MR. EIDT: Yes, but the normal complaint is that it is red spruce and some of the others that are long age trees, that they will grow for another 20 years or 30 years, and they are somewhat suppressed and if there were other cutting methods available, the department does extension and tries to encourage those kinds of cuts in those stands.
One thing you notice on the private lands, a lot of the cutting close to the highway, some of the history may help. There was a lot of cutting on private lands between the war years and after the war for the rebuilding of Europe. There was a lot of wood shipped out of this province plus at the same time a lot of marginal agricultural land was going out of production.
Therefore, along our highways there are a lot of stands that were coming to maturity, in particular the white spruce, and you often hear about that one down in the western end because there have been large cuts of the white spruce stands that now have reached maturity and were succumbing to the spruce bark beetle. A significant amount of cutting that has been taking place has been in those stands and that's a stand that there's no other option really but to clear-cut it and the only thing you can do is leave - if there happens to be some patches of some younger, smaller stuff that is not infested, that can be left.
MR. CHAIRMAN: I want to thank our witnesses if no further questions are coming. I would like to thank the NDP caucus and the Progressive Conservative caucus for showing up here today.
We have one additional point, if I could move on to our next committee meeting, is on June 8th in regard to silviculture. The witnesses that we have brought forward will be Kingsley Brown and Wilma Stubb. That will be from the hours of 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m., so the members will be there.
There are three meetings scheduled, the third one is still up in the air. I will be talking to the members of all three caucuses as to whether we would like to keep that on July 6th or move that to a later date. So if you can keep that last one open on your calendar, I will
probably talk to you when we get to the House about what to do. It might be an idea where we have had two sessions here in the spring, whether or not you want to have it at that time or whether you would like to move it to September. I am open to suggestions from the committee members.
MR. ARCHIBALD: September would be fine for that meeting.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Do you have any comments? Do you agree with that?
MR. PARKER: No problem with that.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Okay, we will probably do that.
If there are no further questions, we are adjourned. Thank you very much.
[The committee adjourned at 11:46 a.m.]