HANSARD

Printed and Published by Nova Scotia Hansard Reporting Services

Mr. John MacDonell (Chairman)

Mr. William Dooks

Mr. William Langille

Mr. Gary Hines

Mr. Charles Parker

Ms. Joan Massey

Mr. Wayne Gaudet

Mr. Keith Colwell

Mr. Gerald Sampson

[Mr. Wayne Gaudet was replaced by Mr. Stephen McNeil.]

In Attendance:

Ms. Mora Stevens

Legislative Committee Clerk

Mr. Jonathan Porter

President

Mr. Downey Thompson

Past-President

Mr. Steve Talbot

Executive Director

Mr. Stephen McIntosh

Communications Director

HALIFAX, TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2004

STANDING COMMITTEE ON RESOURCES

9:00 A.M.

CHAIRMAN

Mr. John MacDonell

MR. CHAIRMAN: Good morning. I want to welcome all committee members back, and certainly the representation from Forest Products Association of Nova Scotia - welcome, gentlemen. The members of the committee will introduce themselves and then I will open the floor for you to introduce yourselves and start your presentation.

[The committee members introduced themselves.]

MR. CHAIRMAN: There is one other member from the NDP caucus who is trying to be in two places at once. She is at the Human Resources Committee across the way, but I think it is her intention to come over here as soon as she can.

So, Mr. Porter, if you would like to begin.

MR. JONATHAN PORTER: I am certainly very pleased to be here. My name is Jon Porter. I am the President of the Forest Products Association of Nova Scotia this year and in my other job I work for Bowater Mersey in Liverpool. Maybe, Downey, would you like to introduce yourself?

MR. DOWNEY THOMPSON: I'm Downey Thompson. I'm Past-President of the Forest Products Association of Nova Scotia and Woodlands Manager with the Elmsdale Lumber Company. I guess probably that is all I need to say.

MR. STEVE TALBOT: I'm Steve Talbot. I'm the Executive Director of the Forest Products Association of Nova Scotia. I will be taking you through the first part of our presentation here this morning, if and when you are ready to go.

MR. PORTER: And, of course, the person who helped them solve all the equipment issues is Steven McIntosh who is our Communications Director.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Welcome. Go ahead, the floor is yours.

MR. TALBOT: I am just assuming that this thing is going to work. We had a few technical difficulties here, but Steve always seems to come through for us.

I just want to thank you for the opportunity for the Forest Products Association of Nova Scotia to come before you today and give you a bit of an understanding of where we are from and so on, and just give you some background on our association as well as looking at some of the economic benefits that the forest industry provides for Nova Scotia and Nova Scotians, also touch on some of the issues and challenges that the forest industry in Nova Scotia faces. Then we'll wrap it up with a few conclusions.

The Forest Products Association is located in Hilden, just outside of Truro. You've probably seen our building on the way by, coming back and forth from Halifax. We have about 700 members who represent various companies that are associated with the forest industry right across Canada. We are an industry organization and, as such, we're recognized as the voice of the forest industry for Nova Scotia.

As I say, we have a large number of members, and they represent a good cross-section of the industry in the province. You can't see the entire slide here, but we do have a number of different sectors, woodlot owners and Christmas tree growers, the maple sugar industry, the saw mill operators, silviculture and harvesting contractors, the logging sector of the trucking industry, as well as the pulp and paper and paperboard companies that are located here in the province.

Just to provide you with a better understanding, perhaps, of where the raw material for our industry comes from, it's good to have an understanding of the landownership pattern in the province. As you can see from this slide, 70 per cent of the forest resource in Nova Scotia is privately owned, and that's represented by the red sectors of the pie chart here. Of that 70 per cent, 50 per cent of the forest land base rests in the hands of private woodlot owners. Now, there are about 31,000 of them across Nova Scotia. So it becomes quite critical, in terms of long-term forest management for the industry, to be working with the private sector and with those private woodlot owners in terms of ensuring that the resource is sustainable.

Looking at some of the economic benefits that the industry provides - and I know you have hard copies of these, so you can probably get a better appreciation of what the slides are representing - the Atlantic Provinces Economic Council, in 2000, did undertake an economic impact study of the forest industry in Nova Scotia. Out of that study, it was indicated that there are about 13,000 direct jobs that depend on forestry, and in excess of 5,000 indirect

jobs. So we're looking at 18,000-plus jobs that depend on the forest sector for a living, mostly in rural areas of the province.

I don't believe you have this slide here, but what it does indicate is that the taxes generated by the forest products sector total about $154 million, $155 million that go into the provincial coffers to support educational programs, social programs, health programs. So it is a major economic factor in the ongoing well-being of the province. One of the other important indicators that came out of the economic impact study was that forestry is the economic engine of rural Nova Scotia. Most of the jobs that are created are created in the rural sector. Without forestry being there, it would be difficult to replace these jobs.

This will give you some indication of the number of people who work on a county-by-county basis across the province. If you look, for instance, at Queens County, you can see that 21.3 per cent of the workforce works in the forest industry in that particular county. Now, that's the same as about one in five people whom you would meet on the street, in the coffee shop or so on, in that area would be associated with the forest industry. Again, you don't see it on the upper part of this slide, but we have similar figures for Inverness County, and even in Halifax, we're approaching 1 per cent of the workforce in that area; in spite of the metropolis of HRM here, upwards of 1 per cent of the workforce is associated with the forest industry as well.

The major, larger industrial sectors that are associated with forestry in Nova Scotia are comprised of Bowater Mersey in the South Shore, the Minas Basin Pulp and Power down in the Annapolis Valley. On the North Shore we have Kimberly-Clark, and Stora Enso in Port Hawkesbury. On the Eastern Shore, Louisiana Pacific. In addition to those pulp and paper and paperboard industries, there are a number of sawmills. These are the medium and larger sawmills located in the province. There are about 75 to 100 of them and, again, they are spread across the province in primarily the rural sectors of Nova Scotia. In addition to those, there are seasonal operators that would probably be in the order of 150 addition to that that operate on a seasonal or part-time basis.

In terms of the economy of the province, forestry contributes about $1.4 billion in terms of shipments and contributes those dollars to the economic well-being of Nova Scotia. Those come from the pulp and paper sector, the lumber sector, paperboard, Christmas tree operations, nurseries, and consulting and contracting services. Forestry is a global operation and we do operate in a global marketplace, and from this particular slide and you can see from your hard copies there, forestry and lumber, pulp and paper products account for about 20 per cent of the provincial exports that go out of the province. That's on a comparable basis to the fishery industry as well as the natural gas industry. One of the important features of looking at this particular slide is that forestry is a renewable industry, much unlike, for instance, the natural gas industry. So, again, we're here for the long term and we operate on a long-term basis.

When you look at the materials and products and commodities that go out of the Port of Halifax, you can see from this slide that the paper and wood products account for three of the five largest commodities that are exported out of the Port of Halifax - just to give you an appreciation for the importance of the industry in terms of exports. Our major trading partner is the United States. At one time we were a little bit more diversified than that, but with the demand for lumber products and pulp and paper, in particular, the U.S. has become our major trading partner, particularly in the northeast area of the U.S.

Looking at some of the issues and challenges that the industry faces, we have grouped these into four major areas: the sustainability of Nova Scotia's forests, communications and public education, forestry practices today, and then several other issues that we are faced with in terms of up and coming items that we have to deal with. So I just want to quickly take you through some of these. The sustainability of Nova Scotia's forests, the forest resource we realize has to be sustainable for the industry itself or the resource itself will not survive. We recognize the need for a balanced approach in terms of managing our forest resource, and our members of the Forests Products Association are active in a range of sustainable practices in their woodlots and Crown land in the province.

We do have a set of seven stewardship principles that we require as a condition of membership in the organization, those principles are supporting integrated resource management. The province now has a set of forestry sustainability regulations which are directed at increasing the amount of silviculture that's carried out. We're certainly supportive of that initiative as well.

[9:15 a.m.]

We realize that the forests in Nova Scotia have to be - well you can't really see the top of it, but again you have it in front of you - managed for a wide range of values, and these include recreational concerns, wildlife habitat, water protection, protected areas and so on. Each of these stakeholders, each of these initiatives do have certain demands on the forest resource, but at the same time we're looking to have a working forest that does supply fibre for industries here, to maintain the industries themselves and the jobs they represent.

What we're suggesting is that on a portion of the forest resource that we have, we as an industry have to be permitted - indeed, encouraged - to practice intensive forest management and be allowed to use the tools that we have in our toolbox to do that. By doing that, we are able to actually - and you have to realize too that because of all the additional demands that are being placed on our resource, the actual working forest is shrinking, so we have to be able to, in terms of science and applying science, grow more trees on less acreage and allow the additional outside acreage to be set aside for protected areas for recreation and the other values that stakeholders in the resource have.

You might be interested to know that we have about 40.3 per cent more forests in Nova Scotia today than we did in 1912. The reason for that is that a lot of the agriculture land base that was in place then has now been reduced, and the reason for the reduction there is simply because the agricultural industry has been allowed to more intensively manage the land base that they have and, as a result of that, they're able to produce more crops on a smaller land base. That's the sort of approach that we're taking as an industry - we want to provide more fibre on a smaller acreage and be able to do that through sustainable forest management.

Some of the practices that are looked at today, at this point I'm going to turn it over to Jonathan to give you a different face to look at and he will lead you through this particular part of the presentation.

MR. JONATHAN PORTER: I want to apologize for the problems we've had cutting off some of the slides, but fortunately you can see them on your hard copy. The map of Nova Scotia, which cut off Cape Breton - certainly our apologies to anyone from Cape Breton -there were a few sawmills in Cape Breton that were missed as a result of that slide.

I'll show some of the slides on the forestry practices - I think even with the reduced screen we'll be able to see some of the photographs - and between Downey and myself, in particular Downey, he has a lot of experience working in the industry over the years and a lot of knowledge of the variety of practices and how they've changed, because forestry practices today are certainly different from what they were in the past. I'm sure I'll have some discussion and questions about that.

To lead off from what Steve said, a critical issue is the ability to manage the woodland for a variety of objectives. We often hear about ones like protected areas and wildlife habitat and their recreation, water quality - all very important objectives, but the objective of managing some of the forest land for wood is also an important objective. Without that, we would not have the industry that is as critical to the province as Steve has already mentioned.

A couple of general points is there has been a huge change in forestry practices. I've only been involved for the last 24 years and the change in that time is phenomenal, and if you go back further you can talk about more changes. One of the biggest changes that people don't appreciate or don't understand is that sawmills are the primary destination of softwood harvested today. People still talk a lot about pulpwood forests or pulpwood monoculture - that is not how the forest is managed today. That is because the change in the pulp and paper industry works primarily off the residuals from sawmills. The primary wood product goes to the sawmills, the roundwood, and because of the incredible advances in sawmilling technology, wood that previously was only used for pulpwood and going into a pulp and paper mill can now be sawn and made a useful, marketable product in a sawmill. That has driven this whole change and it is similar in other parts of the country.

When you look at the forest management side of it, what we are growing today is not a pulpwood forest, it's a sawlog forest. A sawlog is a different dimension to what it was before but that is what we're looking at when we're growing a forest.

I want to put up some slides of the dissimilar range of harvesting practices that are being used in Nova Scotia today, certainly there is a lot of focus on harvest practices, but a lot of people don't see the full range of them. As you know, Mr. Chairman, we had a chance for a tour last week and a number of these practices you would have had a chance to see, not all of them, but certainly some of them.

This is an example of a selection harvest. You can see the lighter green circles through this, this particular method is being used quite often in high-quality hardwoods, it is called a string of pearls. The idea is that you cut a circle then move, cut another circle and you restrict the circles to such a size that they favour hardwood regeneration, you have an opening, but enough shade that the hardwoods that you want, particularly hardwoods like yellow birch and sugar maple, regenerate.

The hardwood stands that we saw on the tour the other day didn't use that method, it used another selection method where you actually go in and pick out individual trees or groups of trees. It is well known that selection forestry is a good method for managing the high-quality hardwood stands, and those are certainly being used in the province today. Selection harvesting is also used in a number of softwood stands, we don't have a slide of that, but it is a similar idea.

Commercial fitting is a very common practice today used in many areas of the province. Again the idea being, it is a partial removal, partial harvest, going in, thinning out a stand and you leave the trees to promote trees to grow into sawlogs. You leave the better quality trees to grow bigger and to grow sawlogs.

The seed tree harvest, this is primarily used in pine, particularly used down in western Nova Scotia where you get a lot of the pine stands, the idea being that you leave some of the better quality individual pines through the area and they will seed in and regenerate this area as a pine stand. You have to be careful what tree species you use that for, if you do a harvest like that in a spruce stand, normally because spruce is a very shallow rooting tree, the spruce trees blow down. If they blow down, they are not there to provide the seed. That's one of the biggest issues when you're dealing with spruce and fir stands, a lot of the partial harvesting techniques will not work with the spruce and fir stands that we have today.

Shelterwood is another method where you remove part of the stand of trees with the idea of seeding in young trees and starting a new stand of trees. This particular one is in the hemlock stand, because hemlock grows well in the shade of other trees. If you open that area up, if you remove more of those trees you are less likely to get hemlock growing.

Now this is not a very clear slide, but it's a method known as variable tension, again, being used in the province for a number of years now. It was really developed out West, Pacific northwest, particularly in B.C. It is called variable because the amount of trees left does vary between different areas and different objectives. Generally, it leaves between 10 per cent and 70 per cent of the trees that you have there at the start. The retention is the fact that you are retaining trees. You may retain them in clumps of trees, large clumps of trees, or as individual trees. Again, you can only leave individual trees if they are the sort of tree which won't blow over. So you could leave a pine tree or a hardwood tree in Nova Scotia, not very often you would leave a spruce tree because a large spruce tree like that would tend to blow over, but you can leave spruce and fir in clumps. Again, one of the things that does is it retains part of the original structure of the stand so in certain areas that's often an important practice.

Of course, everybody's favourite, clear-cutting, still one of the predominant methods used in Nova Scotia today. Based on the type of forest we have here, it should be one of the predominant methods for many years to come. It is very different, a clear-cut you see in most areas today to one you would have seen a number of years ago. Some of the things that have changed - the shape is often very different and if you go on a lot of operations - and again we were fortunate to have the chairman out on tour last week and saw some of the areas we harvested - they're much smaller than they used to be. They have generally more irregular-shaped boundaries that follow corridors. You certainly leave clumps in them. As you know, that's one of the regulations in Nova Scotia today, you leave greenbelts along watercourses and I think I mentioned that certainly on average, they are smaller than they were in the past.

The top bullet there, if you can't read it, is one of the important ones, but you can read it in your report. Certainly the percentage of clear-cutting has declined over the years, there's been a lot of focus in the last few years saying that just about all the cutting in the province has been clear-cutting. That is certainly not true today. Unfortunately, with some of the statistics that come through the federal government, it takes a while for current practices to show up in the current numbers. I know we talked to a number of the larger companies who account for probably close to half the harvesting today and somewhere around a third of all the harvesting they are doing today are partial harvesting methods. That doesn't account for the small woodlot sector, some of those clear-cut, some of those used partial methods, but I know in the major industrial companies about a third of all the land they're harvesting today is using partial harvesting method.

As we talked about, through the previous slide, certainly a lot more attention today when a clear-cut is prescribed and put in place, the protection of water and areas left for habitat. One of the key objectives is that we are looking to grow a healthy new forest on that site, with all our harvesting methods. Steve mentioned one of the challenges today is every year it seems the land base we get to work on is shrinking, there's all these other objectives for land, or land is taken totally out of forestry as we develop highways, industrial sites and recreation sites. There's a shrinking land base on which we have to work to provide fibre.

The top bullet talks about the fact that harvesting and silviculture really go hand in hand. Those are the things that drive - the harvesting provides the product, the silviculture grows the new forest. One example of the level of silviculture is about 10,000 hectares a year is planted, in many parts of the province particularly in the western end it's not necessary to plant because so many trees seed in, in other parts of the province it's essential that you plant.

With the new sustainability regulations that Steve touched on, and I think this committee has heard about in previous presentations, there's in the area of $14 million a year or more being invested annually on both private and Crown lands in the province, and that is a combination of industry money, provincial government money and in some programs wood-lot owners are asked to contribute as well. One of the key silviculture tools is certainly the application of herbicide. It's been very much in the news lately, a lot of misinformation in the media about herbicides. The one that is being used in Nova Scotia is the herbicide Vision, which is the same as the herbicide Roundup, with the active ingredients of glyphosate, it's the most widely used herbicide in the world in agriculture, the mostly widely used herbicide in the world in forestry and extensively reviewed. We'll move on from that but I'm sure we'll have some questions about that one later.

[9:30 a.m.]

Steve touched on our stewardship principles, and four of the key ones that we require our members to commit to is that they conduct their operations as part of a plan which identifies environmental protection and conservation as one of the elements, that their operations comply with the standards out there today on forest and wildlife, and that they make sure that they regenerate those areas either by natural regeneration or planting.

In addition, the model forest in Nova Scotia that the Nova Forest Alliance developed, with multi-stakeholder input, a best management practices which this association adopted back in January 2002, and that includes a code of practice for contractors. One of the things that we do is we audit our members against the commitments they're required to make, and started that back 1979. We're very pleased with the compliance we're seeing to those commitments. Nine new members received their certificate of compliance this year and so far 43 of our members have been audited and have met that standard.

Just a couple of points before I finish off and turn it back to Steve. A lot of members go past just signing on to the stewardship commitments and have developed environmental management systems and, in many cases, sustainable forest management systems, and that's the whole area of certification. I think you've heard some information on certification in the past. I think one of the key points people may not realize is that Canada is a world leader in forestry certification and there are a number of different systems available. I'll give you an example of the different standards, and this is up to date as of this June. Across Canada, there are 127 million hectares under the ISO system, 33 million hectares under the CSA system,

21 million hectares under the SFI system and 4 million hectares under the FFC system. So those are the commonly known systems.

As an association we support all credible systems. Most of the industry-managed lands in Nova Scotia today, either private ownership or Crown lands, are now or very shortly will be certified to one of those systems. It is really driven by requirements of customers as much as anything. So, you need a range of systems, having only one system would not make sense, you need the range of systems because you've got a range of requirements out there and, as you can see by those numbers, certainly the predominant system used in Canada is the CSA system. It's a made "in Canada system", obviously, under the Canadian Standards Association and an extremely stringent system.

The numbers in Nova Scotia are fairly similar. I think I have those, just to give people an idea: under ISO we have over 1 million hectares; under CSA 630,000; under SFI, 1 million hectares and that will increase shortly; and under FSC, 400 hectares.

I will pass it back to Steve.

MR. TALBOT: I just want to finish it up and I'm only going to take a few minutes just to touch on our communications and public education initiatives that we have undertaken over the past couple of years. One of the driving forces behind that program in the Forest Products Association has been Steve McIntosh, and he has been doing an excellent job in terms of getting us out there into the faces of the public a little bit more.

As an industry, we recently did realize that we haven't been doing the job that we should have been doing in terms of reaching the public, the government, media and other interested stakeholders and, we've been taking initiatives to correct that, to get our story out there, to let people know what we do, why we do it and so on. So our commitment over the last few years has been to inform Nova Scotians about modern forest practices and, again, why we do what we do, where we do it, and in addition to that, we have been developing a number of partnerships with various stakeholders across the province to develop two-way communication in terms of what their wants, needs and desires are and, again, to inform them about the forest industry in the province. We have developed a communication strategy and that strategy has three key messages that we are trying to get out there. They centre around forest sustainability, environmental stewardship, and the economic importance of the industry in terms of dollars and jobs.

So that gives you some appreciation of the forest industry in the province and just in terms of concluding our presentation here . . .

MR. PORTER: There's a slide that was skipped here. (Interruption) There are four other issues I just wanted to touch on that we feel are particularly relevant at the moment. I don't know if they're in your package or not, but the four issues are the softwood lumber

dispute, trucking regulations, power and the workforce - just a quick point on each of those and I think they're all very important.

Softwood lumber, I'm sure a lot of people have heard a lot of things about that. It has been a longstanding dispute and I think the simplest way to put it for us is it's critical for the Nova Scotia industry, it's critical for the sawmill industry, and in particular it's critical for woodlot owners, it's critical for the pulp and paper industry, that we find a solution and it appears, certainly to our association and we work closely with the Maritime Lumber Bureau, that there needs to be a negotiated solution to this issue. It doesn't seem that a legislated solution is coming. We certainly had a lot of success with some of the panels, but that hasn't brought a solution. So that needs to be done and that's an important initiative that this government needs to continue to press on.

I think this year we've had some strong lumber prices and so it hasn't been maybe on a lot of people's minds as much as usual. The forecast is certainly that the lumber market will start to decline this winter and into next year and I think then it is going to be even more important and whether it's a sign or not, certainly in the last three weeks lumber prices have dropped $110 U.S. - just in three weeks. So there's certainly a feeling that the high lumber prices are on their way down.

Trucking regulations, again something people may not be aware of, but on January 1, 2006, there will be some new regulations that come into force in Nova Scotia associated with harmonizing weights through the Atlantic Provinces. What that will do, unless there are changes in Nova Scotia, it will significantly reduce the weights truckers can carry on their loads with the existing truck configurations today - probably in the order of 10 per cent on many roads. It's going to have a huge impact again on the whole section from woodlot owners to truckers and sawmills and pulp and paper mills, anyone involved with that business, a significantly increased cost.

Certainly, we have an active transportation committee that's trying to work with the government on this issue as other provinces have. One of the ways to work under these regulations is to look at different configurations of trucks and trailers that will handle loads safely without damaging highways. Unfortunately, so far, it has not been possible to get those configurations looked at and approved in Nova Scotia. For example, in New Brunswick, they've approved a new configuration called a quad and that allows a 10 per cent increase in weight while still meeting all the requirements in terms of safety and ensuring there isn't damage to roads. It's very important that this province look at some of the examples of trucking configurations used elsewhere in Canada rather than just reducing the weights that truckers can carry.

Power - again, a huge impact on the industry, all parts of the industry and in particular pulp and paper, where it is a very energy intensive industry. If any of you have been around a pulp and paper mill, I'm sure you've heard the story of the amount of power they consume.

In today's climate in Nova Scotia the only way for a mill to reduce their power costs is through energy conservation measures, which are certainly important. However, power rates in Nova Scotia are uncompetitive compared with other jurisdictions in Canada, and the manufacturers working in Nova Scotia are forced to compete with manufacturers in other jurisdictions, because we're talking commodity markets here - lumber, pulp and paper.

The proposed increases in Nova Scotia are incredibly worrisome for the industry - it will have a huge impact on costs, and one of the keys that we must find an answer to is to have affordable long-term energy costs in Nova Scotia. That is absolutely critical and we are a long, long way from there today.

The final point on work force - again, a critical issue. A lot of changes in the work force - the jobs in the industry today require a lot more knowledge and understanding of technology. Anyone who has been in a modern sawmill today is probably amazed at the technology, compared with a few years ago. The same for the harvesting equipment, the same for the pulp and paper mills - very, very challenging. In many people's minds, much better, higher quality jobs than some of the old jobs in the industry.

One of the things that we're active in as an association is promoting training of employees - a very important part - and the recognition. One of the programs we recently helped bring out with the Forest Safety Society is a Certified Forest Worker Recognition Program.

The other part of that is - and from my point of view it's one of the myths you frequently hear when people talk about the industry and talk about the requirement to change practices - the perception that there's a large untapped workforce out there just ready to go and work in the industry. That is totally not the case in Nova Scotia today. One of the biggest challenges in all sectors of the industry, particularly from the harvesting or silviculture, is finding people who want to work in the woods today. So going to other management practices that involve more labour is not an alternative that will work in Nova Scotia, because that labour force is not there and available to work in the forest industry - they would much rather work in a city or in various other positions, but not in the industry today.

One of the things that we're doing to look into that is we have commissioned APEC - Atlantic Provinces Economic Council - to do a labour force study of the forest industry, and that will be out later this year.

We'll quickly go through these couple of concluding slides just to wrap things up. The primary forestry is a $1.4 billion industry in the province and supports a total of 18,000 jobs. That certainly doesn't count all the spinoff, particularly in the rural communities right across the province. It is the economic engine in rural Nova Scotia and as an association we're committed to improving communications.

Three other key bullets on the last slide, the top one which you can't read, is the forest resource must be sustainable for the industry to survive. That's just an obvious, simple fact. We live it every day in the industry and that's why so much time and effort is spent making sure, looking long, long into the future, that we have a healthy, productive forest in Nova Scotia. Without a healthy, productive forest we won't have a healthy forest industry - the two go hand in hand.

One of the roles the government has is they do provide support for the silviculture programs on private land - a very, very critical role for the government. It's much less of a level than in the old days when there were federal-provincial agreements, but their support is still a very important part of the process.

[9:45 a.m.]

A balanced approach to forest issues is key. It gets back to what we were talking about earlier - protected areas are important, wildlife habitat is important, water quality is important, recreation is important, you can keep going on that list, but so is growing wood for industry. Sometimes that seems to get lost in some of these discussions. One of the ways that we need to grow wood, is we need to manage some of these lands intensively. Not all of them, but some of them are suitable for growing wood. We have some very productive land. If you look at our province compared to other countries, particularly some of the Scandinavian countries, we grow far less wood on similar land than some of them, and they have a long history of producing a lot more wood.

So, it's not the whole forest that needs to be producing under an intensive forest management system, but it is some of it, and that does include practices like clear-cutting, which is a scientifically sound practice in the forests of Nova Scotia and it does include the correct application of herbicides, which is a safe process when it is done according to the regulations. Thank you.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Downey, I didn't know if you were going to be making part of a presentation as well, so ...

MR. DOWNEY THOMPSON: They've done the presentation. John, I'm here for support and backup.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Before I get to Mr. Langille, who is first on the list, Mr. Porter mentioned education of the workforce. So Downey, I would like to mention to the members about the award Elmsdale Lumber received for the education of their workforce.

MR. THOMPSON: Elmsdale Lumber, the company was founded in 1917 and has been going ever since, so we have been doing everything possible to upgrade everything. We had a program for upgrading and education with our employees. We received awards for that.

Our employees receive awards, even national awards, which are very important, the company put a lot of effort into it. Getting over to the award for last year, we received a merit award for sustainable forestry on the ground. I guess that is maybe the first one in Nova Scotia, but we are sustainable on the ground and received that award.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Would you tell the committee how long you have been working in the forest sector?

MR. THOMPSON: Oh my soul, they wouldn't want to know that John would they? I went with Elmsdale Lumber on the first day of March 1947. I'm still working full time, and I'm on my 58^th year there. I haven't lost one day of work for being sick. I have taken part in all the forestry operations, from cruising to harvesting and forest management, silviculture, whatever we have to do. I think I'm in good health. You fellas have to judge that for yourselves, I guess. It's been a great industry and a great company to work for. John is my next door neighbour. He spent time at my house as a young guy and I have all the respect in the world for John, he's a smart young fella. Anything else John, or is that it? (Laughter)

MR. CHAIRMAN: I think you hit all the high points.

MR. THOMPSON: I told John one time, not to be arrogant, but if you come from Hants County, you're halfway there.

MR. GERALD SAMPSON: Mr. Chairman, I think he's a prime example of why we have to maintain old growth forests.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Langille.

MR. WILLIAM LANGILLE: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I guess I could take up the next hour and ten minutes, but I'll be quick with some of my questions. I'm not going to go into a lot of things in depth. However, there are a couple of things. Before I start, by the way, I have Canadian Tree Farm No. 3, I own that. I do know, not a lot, but I know a little bit about forestry. There has been one thing that has bothered me through the years - I was an absentee landowner for quite a while, I signed up for natural resources forestry program, and I followed it to a certain degree and not researching enough and I did a couple of fairly substantial cuts in my property. One of the things that I found prior to that, back in the 1950s, they wanted people to start planting red pine, which is not natural to Nova Scotia. Of course we got into the European Pine Shoot Moth with it and we got into the Sirococcus and so on and then find out that it's not really merchantable except for telephone poles. In order to grow them you have to plant them close together, through silviculture and so on or else they'll go limbey.

The other thing I found, I did a couple of cuts in the early 1980s and what they recommended then was Norway spruce, you see, another non-native to Nova Scotia, which I planted. Of course they're a fast-growing tree and I think that's where they were going then. However, red spruce, as you know is our native tree and the tree of Nova Scotia, which is a hearty tree, a little slower growing, but a hearty tree. So I planted thousands of Norway spruce on my property. Well I think anybody in the business knows what happens to those. The tops, the beetles get into them. They spring out and once they get so high you just let them go, but those were the right things to do at that time.

I guess my question to you is, where do you stand on non-native species for Nova Scotia now, and Bowater, have they planted those types of trees?

MR. PORTER: First of all, red pine is a native tree of Nova Scotia.

MR. LANGILLE: It is? I thought it wasn't. Okay.

MR. PORTER: In a number of our pine stands west of Nova Scotia you get a mix of white pines and red pines. It is a native species.

MR. LANGILLE: Okay, I stand corrected on that . . .

MR. PORTER: Norway spruce is definitely an introduced tree. I'm not sure why, maybe you can check with Downey, but back in the 1950s, I know red pine was certainly a favourite tree for a while and part of it may be because it was a fairly easy tree to grow in the nurseries. Red spruce, in contrast, is one of the most difficult softwood trees to grow and it took awhile before some of the nurseries learned how to grow it. I think you asked what I felt from Bowater's point of view; at Bowater, our primary softwood we work with is red spruce. That's the softwood that comes back naturally on most of our lands. That's the primary one we plant. We will plant others, maybe black spruce. We have some red pine and Norway spruce plantations from years ago. Where they were planted, they haven't done particularly well in our lands. I know other places in Nova Scotia where the Norway spruce has done very well. I think using exotic trees can work, you just have to take the right precautions. If you look around the world, there's a lot of countries where exotic tree species are used, but we are very lucky in Nova Scotia that we have some very good native species that we can work with. That certainly is our focus. I think you'll find today the focus in just about anybody involved with planting trees, they're focusing on the native species.

MR. LANGILLE: Thank you. I'm just going to touch on a couple of other things that I want to be clear on. What do you set aside for stumpage for silviculture, per cord?

MR. PORTER: The requirement under the regulations is $3 per cubic metre of any softwood that's harvested and 60 cents per cubic metre of any hardwood that's harvested. You then have the choice, you can either, as a buyer of wood in the province, and that's the

sawmill, pulp and paper mill, whoever's buying wood, they can either put that amount as dollars into the provincial forestry fund, which the province manages, or they can do programs themselves, which the majority of buyers seem to have chosen to do. When you work through the calculation of how much silviculture work was done, those are the starting numbers in that count.

MR. LANGILLE: Right, and I guess that's where it's going on this because what you set aside in the provincial fund or what you do yourself, how do you track what you spend on yourself, when you do the requirement for silviculture for setting the money aside?

MR. PORTER: The province has a table of credit values. So it says if you have done, for example, a pre-commercial thinning, which is one of the very common silviculture practices, a lot of people just think the only silviculture in Nova Scotia is planting which it certainly isn't, that's one of many, many practices. If you do a pre-commercial thinning, that allows you so much value per hectare of thinning. So you total up all the treatments you've done, you apply the provincial values, and that shows you if you've met your targets or not and then the provincial Department of Natural Resources comes back and audits you to make sure the treatments have been done correctly.

MR. LANGILLE: And do you know the percentage of what's going into the provincial, rather than going into their own private? I think it's pretty lopsided.

MR. PORTER: Most people have chosen to administer their own programs rather than put it in the provincial fund and I see nothing wrong with that. That shows that buyers are very interested in managing land and being involved with it and making sure it's done right. So I think that's a very positive step.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Langille, I'm going to cut you there and we'll come back.

MR. LANGILLE: That's fine.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Parker.

MR. CHARLES PARKER: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Good morning, gentlemen. I guess I want to ask a question around sustainability and on the amount of harvesting that's being done in our province. There has been a healthy debate on the issue about the annual allowable cut and certainly the impression or reception out there amongst the public I think, is that, you know, we're overharvesting, that we're cutting more than we should be, there's not enough natural regeneration or enough replanting going on to keep up with the amount that's being harvested, and I would just like maybe to address that issue. Are we overharvesting in Nova Scotia? Are we at or near or above our annual allowable cut or not?

MR. TALBOT: In terms of harvesting on an annual basis, we work fairly closely with DNR to create those figures to determine whether or not we are in an overcut situation or not. Just the other day I was talking to the research department in Truro and they don't actually call it an annual allowable harvest, it's termed a potential wood supply, and that's simply because of the amount of private land we have here in the province. But if you look at the potential wood supply for Nova Scotia, you're looking at about 5.9 million cubic metres per year as a potential wood supply.

Now, that means that we could cut up to that and not be in an overcut situation. In 2001, for instance, the softwood cut was 5.3 million cubic metres. That's, again, against 5.9 million cubic metres and these are total figures. In 2002, the figure was 5.18 million and just last year, in 2003, again it was 5.18 million. So if you look at those figures, we are not in an overcut situation. In saying that, what the effect of something like Hurricane Juan would be, it's difficult to say at this point in time because this is 2004 and the activity under that particular catastrophe happened this year, those will be taken into consideration in the future when they're looking at the harvest figures, but to answer your question, according to the research that we've got that's based on the activities of the Department of Natural Resources, we are not in an overcut situation.

If you look at the three different sectors which would be Crown land, large industrial and small private, again on the Crown land situation, the figures indicate that we are not in an overcut situation and the same would apply to large industrial. When it comes to the private sector, it's a very close situation when it comes to the private land, but you have to realize too by saying that, that nobody is going to tell a private woodlot owner in this province what to do. I mean that's a right that the private woodlot owners have. That's a right that we as an industry respect, but again looking at the figures overall and on an individual basis, we are not in an overcut situation here.

Now, in saying that, I'm saying that based on the amount of silviculture that's currently in place and as I think was indicated earlier, we were doing about $14 million worth of silviculture in this province on an annual basis and based on that, as I said before, if we maintain that level of silviculture, we're not in an overcut situation.

[10:00 a.m.]

MR. PORTER: Just to add to what Steve said, the province does their calculations every five years and they're just about to do a new one. You have to look at this question every five years and see where we are. As Steve said, if you look from when they did the last one, in fact I think on average we've harvested about 10 per cent less than the 5.9 cubic metres in softwood. If you look at the amount of silviculture, as Steve mentioned, that's been done over that part time, we've done almost 30 per cent more than we needed to do. The harvest is less, silviculture is more.

MR. PARKER: The other aspect is looking into the future. You've heard it, I've heard it, lots of people have heard it, at some point we're going to run out. In other words, the regeneration and the replanting is not keeping up. I think it's because of the age of the trees are going down; the percentage of trees over 100 years old is minimal, the percentage of trees over 80 years old is far, far less than it used to be and even over 60 years old is less. At some point, are we going to catch up? Are we going to come to a point where we're not going to have enough trees?

MR. PORTER: We would not agree with the statement that we're going to run out of trees. When we say sustainability is vital for the industry, that's something we look at long term every day. When you look at the modelling that goes on and these calculations, that shows there will be a sustainable forest in the future and that the silviculture is more than keeping up with the harvesting.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Sampson.

MR. GERALD SAMPSON: One of the things that you mentioned, Jon, was the fact that you're growing a sawlog forest, so my question on that is, what about the hardwood end of it?

MR. PORTER: We're growing a hardwood sawlog forest too. The issue, I think we saw on the tour one of the areas we're managing for hardwoods and the selection and management is to grow high-quality yellow birch. The hardwood resource in this province is not of high quality today and you can go back through the more than 300 years of history of work in the forests of Nova Scotia and find all kinds of reasons why it's different from today. In general, it's a lower-quality hardwood and so it will take a long while to improve that quality. It doesn't happen overnight.

There are a lot of measures, such as those selection harvest slides that have been taken by various landowners to improve the quality. The focus when you're growing hardwood is definitely to grow hardwood sawlogs because that's where the value is.

MR. GERALD SAMPSON: So it's not a monoculture of just spruce?

MR. PORTER: Definitely not.

MR. GERALD SAMPSON: There's a farmer in my area - that forgotten area of Cape Breton - Mr. Hank Niesten, who did away with the use of pesticides and herbicides in his hothouses and introduced ladybugs that he brought over from Europe, which are a natural predator to aphids and other things that would decimate a crop. He got away from using pesticides altogether. I'm sure there will be lots of questions on Vision. As an alternate to the application of Vision, is there any research being done that there may be a natural predator that could be introduced to the forest that would do away with bugs that would damage trees?

I know you're in the process of spraying to kill the hardwoods to allow the softwoods to grow, but I'm thinking of the spruce budworm devastation that we had and other things that interfere with growth. Is there any research into the introduction of a natural predator rather than continuing to spray?

MR. PORTER: A couple of points. I think one of the key things when you're talking herbicides, the aim is not to kill the hardwood, it's to slow the hardwood down so that the softwood can come up. You and Mr. MacDonell saw on the tour, when you go in an area many years after Vision is applied, there are lots of hardwoods and lots of grass and other things growing. It's just a case of slowing it down.

The federal government does research in pest management and various techniques. You have to be very careful when you talk about introducing some exotic species to control things. Some of the problems we have in the forest today are because of pests that were brought from overseas - things like the beech bark disease, which is why we don't have any good stands of beech anymore, Dutch elm disease. Anyway, bringing in exotic bugs to do that work is a very risky thing that would need lots of research.

We certainly, as an association, support ongoing attempts to find better methods and I know one that was trialed this Spring is there are funguses that when you cut a hardwood clump with a brush saw, you can apply a fungus to that stump and that will rot the stump and stop the stump from sprouting. That's a new technique that has been tried this year in Nova Scotia to see if it will work. So, yes, we're certainly interested in trying to find techniques. There aren't a lot on the horizon right now.

MR. GERALD SAMPSON: Just touch lightly on the Vision. (Interruption) All right, I'll wait for the questions on Vision then, Mr. Chairman. In this round here, power rates for mills, which is a real deterrent - when I look at Stora Enso with the proposed increase in power rates from Nova Scotia Power, $18 million it will cost them in additional costs this year - are there any mills or sawlog companies that generate their own power and when I think of that, I mean if the power goes down, hospitals have emergency generators, but what about a sawmill with its own generating system of power? Is that feasible or is it just not economical to do that?

MR. PORTER: I think certainly there are some operations that generate part of their power, but on the scale you would need to be economical, there's nothing that scale that I know of in Nova Scotia.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. McNeil.

MR. STEPHEN MCNEIL: Thank you for the presentation. You had mentioned earlier that herbicides were part of your practice. Who regulates that? Who regulates the application of the herbicides?

MR. PORTER: The actual application is regulated, it's a two-part process for the permit through the Department of Natural Resources and the Department of Environment and Labour. The actual regulation of the herbicide itself is the federal government.

MR. MCNEIL: No, but who regulates when you're applying it?

MR. PORTER: The actual applying on-site would be the Department of Environment and Labour.

MR. MCNEIL: So how many times when your company is applying herbicide is somebody there from the Department of Environment?

MR. PORTER: That's up to the Department of Environment. They could be there every time, it's their choice when they bring an inspector on. They're certainly there quite often. I can't give you a number. I can't tell you this year how many days they're on and how many days they're off. I think they were certainly there very frequently.

MR. MCNEIL: When you apply an herbicide, do you have a test that you can do to ensure that you've hit, for example, an aerial application, is there a test that your company performs to ensure that you've hit the proper target?

MR. PORTER: You calibrate the spray nozzles from the helicopter. That's part of the process of getting set up right and there's a lot of technology that is involved with developing the right sort of nozzles for the boom to get it in the same place, plus, as you know, you monitor the wind speed to make sure that if the wind picks up, then you stop spraying.

MR. MCNEIL: But after you've applied the herbicide, can you go in on the ground and test that you've hit the right spot? How do you test it? Do you test the soil, do you test the plant?

MR. PORTER: If you're asking if there's a process we follow as a routine, no, you can test, as we read in the media in the recent allegation of a person who claims he was sprayed, one of the best ways you can see the results is from an aerial photograph a few weeks earlier where you can clearly see the area where the leaves are starting to turn and the green buffer right around that where there has been no herbicides.

MR. MCNEIL: But after an application has been applied, can you go in and test the soil on that spot and find Vision in that soil? Is there a test for that?

MR. PORTER: I'm not the right one to answer that. You would have to ask the Department of Environment what the tests are. My understanding is that they can test for it.

MR. MCNEIL: In the soil, but that leads to the problem. That's the anxiety that's being created around this, you know, we're being told that you can test it in the soil, yet you don't know. So the anxiety for the community - and I represent the riding, by the way, that the overspraying is alleged to have happened - this is a month later. The government's unprepared to be able to deal with it, yet we're allowed to do it. If the aerial spray is so safe, we could have solved this issue two weeks or three weeks ago and be prepared to go deal with it.

That's the problem, whether you agree or disagree with the application of an aerial herbicide being sprayed. What is there when somebody in the community has a question about whether there's actually been an overspray, whether there's a question around the way it's been applied? From my perspective, the industry, in my view, in many ways because it certainly is a valuable asset to the Province of Nova Scotia in particularly rural Nova Scotia, it's one of the cornerstones of the economy. If there's so much anxiety out in the community, you should be directing much of the energy toward the government, saying, listen guys, get onboard here, get direct, support us, make sure that we're doing what you're able to back up; to eliminate all that anxiety that many of my constituents are feeling right now.

MR. PORTER: I think, as you may have read, the applicator in this case, one of the things he said is that he's encouraging the government to resolve this issue, finish their investigation, and it's been reported that there is a test and that test is ongoing. Remember, this is exactly the same chemical that is applied frequently on fields right through the Annapolis Valley.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Hines.

MR. GARY HINES: Yes, a couple of issues I want to take up. In marketing, I don't know how directly involved you are with marketing or whether you have another division of the organization in your industry, but I've heard recently that there are some problems with shipping this year's Christmas trees to foreign countries. Have you heard anything about that, or has there been any resolve or has anybody brought forward information to how they may be moving those products?

MR. PORTER: I don't know of any of that. Are you up to . . .

MR. TALBOT: No, we're not particularly involved in the marketing end of it. There is a Christmas Tree Council of Nova Scotia that looks after that particular sector. I'm not aware of any problems that they've had in terms of reaching traditional market.

MR. HINES: The problem is, I guess, the company that has been transporting them in their containers have a shortage of containers, so the availability of the shipping mechanism are not there with this particular company. I was just wondering if you had heard anything?

MR. PORTER: Certainly, I know, in general, there has been a shortage of containers. I didn't know it was particularly an issue with the Christmas tree industry.

MR. HINES: Yes, it was indicated to me there was.

MR. TALBOT: You do have to use refrigerated containers to ship those in.

MR. HINES: Yes, that's right. Okay, let me move onto another one. I just recently came back from a conference on natural resources and one of the big issues there was with global warming, the issue regarding wildfire. Has wildfire become a topic of discussion with your industry and, if so, are you prepared to participate with other levels that may be dealing with addressing those concerns?

MR. PORTER: In what context?

MR. HINES: Well, this year, in particular, in British Columbia, there were a lot more fires than there have been traditionally, and it's because of global warning. I just wondered if you fellas have recognized that as one of the enemies that might be surfacing or one of the growing problems that you might be having with the industry?

MR. PORTER: Certainly, when we discuss the issues of climate change and we listen to people who are experts in that, that is one of the areas that they mention and, with a change in climate, we could see more wildfires. Certainly, in Nova Scotia, we have a very good record of fire protection and prevention, and the Department of Natural Resources are second to none in that in this province. It's been very successful, but the thought is that there will be more instances as we see more climate change, if that continues.

MR. HINES: The reason I asked that question is because, coming back from that conference it's my intention to perhaps establish a pilot project between fire services and Natural Resources. In my area some of the communities are surrounded by heavy forestry, and I just wondered if there was an opportunity perhaps for somebody from your industry to work with that effort as I get to develop it?

The last question is education and it deals somewhat with Mr. McNeil's concern. Education, of course, is something like leading the horse to the water and getting it to drink. Since this issue surfaced I have made it a point because I'm an elected representative, but also concerned as a citizen. The education seems to be out there and I can understand the problem that you as an industry suffer from in trying to get people to be proactive with getting that information, there seems to be a reaction to everything that's negative, I just wondered what efforts you've taken to be proactive with your education process. Probably Stephen McIntosh might be the one that wants to address that.

[10:15 a.m.]

MR. MCINTOSH: Not to point fingers or anything, but you have to understand the context of how this issue emerged this year. The division issue emerged because of a Crown land spraying program. Simultaneously, various members of our association were doing the same type of herbicide applications that have gone very smoothly and there has been no public backlash, no political backlash. Each company takes their own responsibility in the private sector to do their own communications plan when they apply herbicides in their own areas.

I have been fortunate to be included in some of them, and each of them is different. There are a lot of communications that are done in terms of notifying people, neighbourhoods, times, dates, all and any precautions that have to be taken. On the issue of Crown land, I will let the Crown answer that.

MR. HINES: My question was more in general. Steve's gone on the defensive - that wasn't what I was looking for. What I was looking for is what you use, or how do you get your message out there so that it doesn't become something you have to be reactive to? What have you done right? That is what I want to know.

MR. PORTER: Part of the reason that Forest Products brought Steve on a couple of years ago and started this communication program was because we realized that there was not a good understanding of the forest industry, or forest practices in Nova Scotia. We have been getting out to municipal councils, and we work with the forestry association, which works with children in the schools - there are a number of those sorts of avenues - the Forestry Safety Society which does a lot of training. It is part of the partnership that Steve talked about. We try to link with other organizations who are interested in educating and communicating.

MR. HINES: Obviously it has worked well for you. Thank you, John.

MR. PORTER: Thank you, Steve.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Colwell.

MR. KEITH COLWELL: First of all I want to thank you for coming in today. It has been very informative for me and I'm sure it has been for all the members of the committee. I just have a couple of questions. In the event that a large contractor harvests a property for a landowner, you talk of reforestation - what guarantee does a landowner have that that property will be reforested when they are done?

MR. PORTER: The way programs work today, the landowner has a variety of places they can go and ask for help in reforesting that land. If it needs planting or, after it comes back naturally it needs thinning, there are a lot of companies today in the province that offer programs. The landowner can go directly to one of those companies who offer programs and

in many cases silviculture contractors, once they see an area harvested, will go and visit the landowner themselves so, even before the landowner needs to contact someone, they will be contacted.

The other place is the Association for Sustainable Forestry, which is a pilot program between our association and the Woodlot Owners Association. They have been provided some of the money from the provincial fund that was talked about earlier, and they can go to that group to get work done. So it's really left to the landowner. If the landowner doesn't want to do anything, they don't have to, but if they want to reforest they have a number of avenues to get the work done - it's their choice.

MR. TALBOT: One of the initiatives that we are looking at putting in place is a certified contractor designation and we are working with a number of different partners to set this up. The objective would be to ensure to a woodlot owner or to the general public that the people that they are hiring to do the work on their property, whether it's 50 acres or 500 acres, the work will be carried out by a certified contractor who abides by certain standards that have been set up in terms of forest management, sustainability, silviculture, but that particular woodlot owner or member of the public doesn't have to question whether or not this particular person has the proper training behind him and meets certain qualifications in terms of dealing with his particular property. This is one of the initiatives that we're looking at setting up, hopefully, within the next year.

MR. COLWELL: Sounds good. You mentioned Hurricane Juan. My area was devastated by Hurricane Juan, there were a lot of trees down, it's a real mess as far as the forestry industry goes and probably will be a real fire hazard. Has the government approached the forest industry in Nova Scotia to help resolve this problem, or have they just sort of walked away from it?

MR. PORTER: When you say resolve the problem, do you mean the problem of the trees that are on the ground today?

MR. COLWELL: Also the potential hazard of forest fires that are going to happen as these trees die.

MR. PORTER: Certainly, the forest industry has been very active since the hurricane in working with landowners to try and help them salvage their land. It's only a certain period of time, particularly if a tree is completely blown over, before that wood spoils. If it's only partly over, it can last a lot longer. So a lot of activity there. Also, the association was asked by the government to be involved with the program to assist landowners, I believe it's administered by Emergency Measures. We were asked by the government to participate in that.

MR. TALBOT: There are a number of different agencies involved in that program and Emergency Measures kind of headed it up, but you also have the Department of Natural Resources, Access Nova Scotia and so on. The objective there is to provide assistance to woodlot owners who have had damage on their properties and ensure that the properties that receive assistance are put in such a state that they will be able to regenerate the next stand of trees. In other words, they're assisting the salvage part of it. There's probably about 50 per cent of the downed areas that have been salvaged, to date, through that program.

MR. THOMPSON: I don't mean to interfere, John, but I think several private sawmills have jumped in to help with Juan. I can speak on behalf of Elmsdale Lumber, we jumped in there and bought wood from the people, we reduced our own harvest. This year, Elmsdale Lumber reduced their own harvest on their own land to 8 per cent of our cut; 60 per cent of the wood that we're taking in came from the hurricane belt. That's our contribution towards cleaning up the wood. We approached some landowners, sometimes it would come through a group, but the wood did end up at the mill and we've been working on that there. I guess it'll go on probably until next Spring or next Summer, but I think most of the wood will get harvested, maybe all of it.

There's some marginal stands with 5 or 10 per cent down. In my opinion, it's debatable whether you go in and take that out. We have a natural mortality, in the 60 years I've been in the business, natural mortality has taken a toll on the forests. We have allowed the forests to overmature, trees die. I'm an old man, I'm not going to be here for too many more years, but I think the forest is the same way. We went in and did our share, most of the local sawmills have bought wood.

I guess I wasn't very clear, John, but I think most of the sawmills have done their part in helping out. I just received the figures before I left yesterday, our annual cut this year will only be 8 per cent of the company's freehold, and it's growing a heck of a lot faster than we're cutting it. Anyway, that's what forest management is about, if there's a piece of land that's burnt, you should clean it up; if it blows down, you should clean it up.

I had the personal experience of working with Hurricane Edna in 1953, which went across this province. That's 51 years in August, I was there. We jumped in and harvested, but there was a big problem at that time and we didn't get all the wood because we didn't have a good road system in place like we have today. It was inaccessible. We would get in and try to get some out, but we started building roads and we did clean up most of the land.

Then where John lives, in the Summer of 1943, I was just at home on the farm and there was a fire in the Hants County area, Enfield-Elmsdale-Nine Mile River, that burnt 10,000 acres of land and the only way we got it out was when it started raining. Today we have all these local fire departments. We have good roads through the woods that these local fire trucks go right in and get it going and try to knock it down and then DNR comes in with

helicopters and the ground application, and my experience with forest fires over six decades has been if you can knock the fire down the first day, it probably will not get away.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Colwell, I'm going to cut you off there and if you want, put your name on for the second round for short snappers. Ms. Massey.

MS. JOAN MASSEY: Thank you for coming in today. I think, you know, in a way you're stuck between a rock and a hard place because the government is allowing - I'm going to talk about herbicides - the spraying of herbicides. There's a lot of controversy around that issue, we all know that, and I think we're going to hear a lot more as we move along in this session. You know if we look at what's going on in the rest of the world, Denmark has banned Vision, or the actual chemical that's in it, because they have found that it does dissolve in groundwater and it sometimes can have a half-life of 35 days to 65 days in groundwater. Sweden has banned it after scientists have linked it to increasing incidences of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and the Ontario College of Family Physicians has published a lot of literature that's showing evidence of health risks to patients who are exposed to pesticides.

John and I have both sat and listened to representatives from Monsanto, I've done a lot of research on my own and so has staff. You just have to go on-line and you're just hit with a magnitude of research and documents from everywhere - from the United States, Canada. So you're put in a position of reading these documents and trying to make some kind of sense out of them. So you're looking at one study versus another. Some of the facts that are available point to glyphosate having a half-life of anywhere from 3 to 130 days. So, you know, that's an issue. It remains unchanged in the soil for a varying length of time. It has been shown to be toxic to insects and slightly toxic to fish. Now, this is, you know, some of the data that's out there.

So I guess from my point of view and our caucus, we are against the spraying of this herbicide in Nova Scotia. In saying that, we do know that there are companies out there that are not using it, for example Stora, and we just did a tour of the Stora facility a couple of weeks ago and they seem to manage without it. Now, the government is not helping them along in that end because the way I understand it is that the province is no longer growing seedlings, two-year seedlings, they're just growing one-year which are smaller. So that's an issue with Stora.

My question to you I guess is, if you stopped using herbicides on the lands that you harvest, what effect would it have on you specifically? I mean have you done any research in really looking at that and saying, you know, if tomorrow we stopped using herbicides, how would that affect us in our business?

[10:30 p.m.]

MR. PORTER: A couple of points and certainly from some of the reports there's a lot of differing information released on Vision or glyphosate, as you pointed out, because it is important that people remember this is the same herbicide that is used on agriculture in Nova Scotia and worldwide. It just happens that in Nova Scotia it's labeled under the name Vision. I believe there are restrictions in Denmark. It is not banned in Denmark, and I think, in fact, very recently some of those restrictions were actually lifted.

Another point on documentation, certainly with the Internet today, you can search for just about anything and find lots of information, but unfortunately that doesn't always help you tell whether it's valid information or not and one of the keys with scientific research obviously is if the research is being peer reviewed and other reputable independent scientists agree with the conclusions. In particular the case you mentioned with Sweden about non-Hodgkins lymphoma, that was not peer reviewed, as I understand it, when it was released. It has been since, by independent scientists and has been throughly discredited. So that one study is frequently quoted and people seem to forget the reviews which show that it's not considered a reputable study.

Certainly, the immediate impact of not using herbicide on lands that are managed for fibre because I'm not sure if it was just before or just after you joined the meeting, but what we are saying is that some of the forest land needs to be managed intensively. There's a lot of it which is for other purposes, but on those lands if we stopped having the ability to use herbicides, it would reduce the amount of wood that can be grown and therefore the amount of wood that can be harvested on those lands.

MR. TALBOT: You mentioned Stora and I've talked to the woodlands people up there and their decision not to use the spray operation is purely a corporate decision. They did indicate to me that they had no safety or health concerns about applying a herbicide program, but they did indicate as well, that there are challenges that have come up with respect to not being in a spray program and some of those challenges and dealing with those challenges have not always been successful. So they've taken it upon themselves to actually plant larger seedlings, which is fine, but it's not all roses in terms of the results of not being able to apply a spray program here in the province.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Well, I'm going to ask a few questions myself and then, honestly, to the members of the committee, I'm going to try to restrict myself accordingly. You guys can get a coffee and get back in 20 minutes. (Laughter)

I guess a couple of things. Mr. Porter, I really enjoyed the tour the other day. It was educational and it was productive, for me, I know. I want to go back to a couple of things that you told me there and the information I have here and if I'm correct, you said that the holdings for Bowater were 600,000 acres?

MR. PORTER: Yes.

MR. CHAIRMAN: The mill gets about a third of its wood supply from its own holdings?

MR. PORTER: About a third of the logs supplied for our sawmill come from our own lands. Yes.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Well, I'm wondering, what does that mean in relation to your pulp mill or your pulp and paper operation? Is that just the chips from the sawmill?

MR. PORTER: Where the pulp and paper mill just uses chips, about half of the chips supplied for the pulp and paper mill come from our own sawmill and the other half come from sawmills big and small throughout western and even parts of central Nova Scotia.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Well, I've been crunching some numbers, and you can say, my math isn't very good, but I'm looking at the information that's here - if I take Bowater, Kimberly Clark, Stora, Louisiana Pacific and Minas Basin - I totalled up the tons of product for each operation and even though Stora Enso has the newsprint and the super calender which together is quite significant. In doing that, I then took an average of tonnes of production on those five mills and that came out to about 263,000 tonnes of production as an average. I then made the big assumption that if about one-third of your wood supply came off that 600,000 acres, it would take about 1.8 million acres to meet your whole need in wood supply. Actually, what you just mentioned about your chips would mean it should be more than that.

Judging by that, if there's a correlation between the product and the wood supply necessary to make it, then those five mills all would need actually more than the 1.8, but we'll stick with 1.8 million, that comes up to about 9 million acres in Nova Scotia to supply the wood necessary for those five operations. What the department refers to as the operational forest, what we can harvest on, is about 6 million acres in Nova Scotia and I didn't include the large and medium sawmills in Nova Scotia, I didn't put them into the picture. It can only appear to me that we're overharvesting and I take into account Mr. Talbot's numbers from the department.

There was a report done by the Canadian Forestry Service in 1998 which says we're overharvesting in the Atlantic Region. They mentioned New Brunswick specifically as overharvesting by 1.5 times. I'm just wondering what I missed in my big assumptions here.

MR. PORTER: I think it's misleading to go from the mills back, but the primary thing is, I said, one-third of our log supply comes from our own land, but that's only a small portion of what we harvest off our lands. That's just the spruce and fir sawlogs - we harvest pine on our lands, we harvest hardwood on our lands, we harvest hemlock on our lands,

which we supply to other mills, so the yield of the 600,000 acres is far greater than just a third going in. With the regulations the province has brought in, we now have good numbers every year on how much wood is cut. We have good numbers every year on how much silviculture.

There's some very good modelling processes where you can see how much wood you're growing as a result of what's there today, what's being harvested, how much work is done in silviculture and as Steve mentioned, that clearly shows that at today's rate of harvest, we're harvesting less than you could under that calculation and we're doing more silviculture. It's misleading if you work from the mills back because there's other wood going to a lot of different places.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Talbot, was it 5 million cubic metres that you said?

MR. TALBOT: It was 5.9.

MR. CHAIRMAN: What's that work out to? Is it 2 cubic metres to the cord or 1.8? I just want you to give me a number in cords.

MR. PORTER: It's a little less than double. I don't have the facts with me, I'm just calculating. Probably about 11.5 million.

MR. CHAIRMAN: About 11.5 million. I was thinking it should be about 3 million.

MR. PORTER: I've gone the wrong way, haven't I? After all these years of learning in cords, I've now switched enough cubic metres and tons that I can't go back again. Yes, 3 million.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Okay, thank you. That's roughly what the harvest has been for maybe slightly less than the spike in 1999, but that's what the department, I think, has been saying for some time. I'll cut myself off there and Mr. Langille?

MR. LANGILLE: Two questions - the first, I just want to know if I heard right from the NDP, Ms. Massey, is the NDP caucus against Roundup. Is that what I heard? (Interruption) Well, Vision is Roundup.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Against the spraying of Vision on Crown lands.

MR. LANGILLE: And Roundup.

MR. CHAIRMAN: No, the spraying of Vision on Crown lands.

MR. LANGILLE: But not private lands? Okay, just Crown lands. I just wanted to clear that up. Thank you.

A couple of questions there. One is, how long does it take to regenerate a forest for pulp and merchantable logs? I know it would vary in different parts of Nova Scotia, but on average, what are we talking about, 40 years?

MR. PORTER: It's tough to average. I'll speak for western Nova Scotia, which I'm more familiar with, but from the harvest to when we next go in and our first treatment where we would remove trees would be our commercial thinning, is probably about 40 years from harvest to when you go back in and do your first removable. That's, as I've said, thinning, where you're taking out about one-third.

MR. LANGILLE: I guess that's less than a generation for a renewable product, is it not?

MR. PORTER: But remember there are a number of thinnings, you'll do a further harvest later on.

MR. LANGILLE: We're talking softwood and not hardwood here.

MR. PORTER: Right.

MR. LANGILLE: The other thing you touched on is the lack of young people coming up to go into the forest. I just want to bring to your attention that in high school there is one program that I'm aware of, and I think it's the only program in Nova Scotia and it's in Stellarton and these are high school students who don't take the academic course and they offer a course in woodlot management, under silviculture. In fact, they've just signed quite a contract to do with Michelin. I know there are other areas in the province that would like to start that program, because they realize that there are jobs out there. It's not for everybody, because these are hard jobs. Silviculture is hard work. I know I do it almost every weekend now, along with my son. I think that your companies ought to encourage these types of programs for high school students to become involved in. I'm not sure of the education down in the Liverpool area if they even have a program like this, but I think it would be compatible and probably in the best interest of companies in Nova Scotia to encourage this type of student activity. I just wanted to bring that up, Mr. Chairman.

MR. PORTER: That's a very good point. We have a resource, the forest, that is sustainable and the industry can support the economy of Nova Scotia for years and years to come but we got to have people working in the industry.

MR. TALBOT: One of the initiatives that we're involved with, and you might be interested in this, is that each year we have a teachers' tour in the Summertime and we do

this in conjunction with New Brunswick where we bring in a slate of about 40 teachers that will spend, basically, a week, or at least five days, in a forest environment, completely isolated, we take them right to the woods to see what we're doing and so on. The last one was down at Oak Island Inn in August where we had, I think, it was 20 teachers from Nova Scotia, 10 from New Brunswick and five from both P.E.I. and Newfoundland. The experience that they go through really completely changes their view of forestry and how it's conducted. You're right, we really need to be focusing on high schools, high school teachers and high school students in terms of what it's all about.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Parker.

MR. PARKER: Two quick questions, if I can. First of all, your Forest Products Association, do you still administer the gasoline tax rebate on forest roads and if so, what amount of money?

MR. TALBOT: Yes, we still do. This past year the total was $720,000. That has, in the past, been as high as $1 million a year. Those funds all go on the ground to assist private woodlot owners to construct and maintain woods into their private woodlots. I think one of

the biggest benefits over the past year has been, because of the roads that access these private woodlots, being able to get into harvest Hurricane Juan salvage wood that has been down. It certainly adds to the efficiency of fire protection in this province and that's in addition to the prime purpose of getting in to do silviculture and harvesting.

[10:45 a.m.]

MR. PARKER: My second question then is again around Vision. There's certainly a lot of anxiety in the public out there about this. The public is demanding more environmentally-friendly practices and certainly that's part of certification. One of your members, I believe Stora Enso, as been previously mentioned, has made the corporate decision in 1997 to do away with Vision. They go with larger seedlings and they go with manual cleaning. That's an alternative, I guess, that works for them. Is that something that other members of your association are considering or would consider, you know, because I'm sure you're getting lots of sleepless nights over this issue and the public is demanding more environmentally-friendly practices.

MR. PORTER: There's a wide range in Nova Scotia forests. So a practice may work well in one area and not as well in another area and certainly there are some areas where you can do a manual weeding to remove the competing, especially if they're the small hardwood trees. That doesn't work well in areas where, for example, you've got raspberries rather than red maple stumps. It's also a cost issue and there's the safety issue because certainly we hear the anxiety about Vision. The other thing, when you go to manual methods using a brush or a power saw, there are some very high accident rates within that and if you've got to do many treatments in the same area to keep those sprouts from competing, you've got to take that

into account. So, you know, it's a cost issue as well as an efficiency issue and everybody looks at the best way they can to manage the land they have.

As I mentioned earlier, there's a new treatment that was tried this year where a fungus is applied to stumps as they're cut to rot them down so they don't sprout back. So as alternatives come out, they're looked at, but it has to be run as a business as well and you only have to look to some of the stories coming out of New Brunswick, what happens when costs get too high in the forest industry, the recent problems at Nackawic.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Sampson.

MR. GERALD SAMPSON: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank the gentlemen. That was a very informative tour. I really appreciated that and it really increased my information around the forest industry. There's just one thing before I get into the question. Memorial High School in Sydney Mines has just discontinued their forestry program. They sold the portable bandsaw this summer, they're out of that. So when you say you take the teachers yearly to inform them on what's going on with the industry, I think you should take the students and take school board members. The school board members are the people who will fight for the funding for this and as soon as anything happens to the funding, these programs are gone. So that portable bandsaw is now gone to the private sector somewhere, through an auction, and the program is disbanded down in the Cape Breton area.

To get to the spraying of Vision, I walked in the woods - I did a lot of hunting a few years back - and I walked in the Glendyer Mountain in Middle River about three weeks after it had been sprayed. Now, as a firefighter, I've gone in the very next day where there has been a fire in the woods and there are still hot spots and I was thoroughly amazed to see spider webs between the trees and the blackened stumps, but when I walked in those woods in the Glendyer Mountain, it was like some kind of nuclear fog had gone through. Everything was perfect in the woods, but there wasn't one sound, there wasn't a spider web, there was nothing. Along the shores of the bank of a brook I found two partridge about 50 feet apart, like they just laid down and died, there was nothing wrong, and the sorriest thing I did is I didn't pick them up and take them with me to have them tested, but whether they drank the water from the brook, whether they ate berries that were sprayed, whatever caused them, but they were just in perfect condition. They weren't shot or anything like that. They were just perfect birds.

So that kind of gave me a scare and it's quite often when we have heavy rains and run-off that the run-off from farmers' fields that we're all becoming more and more aware of, pollutes brooks, rivers and streams and things like that. Roundup is just a stronger version, apparently, of Vision. What is to stop Vision from being detrimental to the brooks which eventually run down the mountainside and find their way down to the lake and then find their way to the ocean?

I point to the fact that we are now buying strawberries that are as big as grapefruits from chemical application, maybe it is from fertilizer, I don't know. Maybe fertilization of trees would make them grow quicker, rather than the spraying of Vision or a combination of both. There's got to be something that is less effective on human health. I understand that Vision is supposed to be really safe. One of the employees down in Cape Breton from the Department of Environment poisoned his own well by spraying Vision on his lawn in a rural area and, of course, it got into the well and poisoned his well. Not a very good record for somebody who is working for the department.

When I see figures and hear experts, I am very critical. If someone were to drink it and pass away, I'm sure that they could prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that he had a brain tumour or he had an infected toenail, it wasn't the swallowing of the glass of Vision. The people who make these things . . .

MR. CHAIRMAN: Are you waiting for a response?

MR. GERALD SAMPSON: Where would the forestry be with or without the spraying of Vision? More jobs for more people equal a better economy. I know profit is the bottom line in any business, but if there were less spraying and more manual application, then you would have more people working in the industry, which would create a better economy. It would put that little four-letter "fair" word in there, it would be a little more fair for workers too.

Maybe I'm getting back to what Ms. Massey asked, where would you be today, or could you start a phase-out program, a phase out of Vision and phasing in more workers into the industry?

MR. PORTER: I guess two quick comments on that. As I mentioned earlier, the potential employees you talk about are not there, they are not available. You talk to the contractors where they are in harvesting and silviculture and one of the biggest challenges is that you cannot find people who want to go work in the woods. So to say that's the answer - we've all got to look long term and see how we can encourage people to get into that industry, but they are not there today.

MR. GERALD SAMPSON: I have people calling my office from Cape Breton who say, Gerald, I worked in the woods all my life, I've worked in silviculture for years, now I haven't had work for three years. So there are people out there, now whether or not they would move into the old-fashioned logging camps, give them a place to live for six months before they would go back home, I don't know, but there are people unemployed in my area who would be willing to work in the silviculture industry.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. McNeil.

MR. MCNEIL: I just wanted to clarify when it was mentioned, our caucus called for a moratorium on aerial spraying of Vision. I will speak for myself at this point, I won't speak for the caucus, but not opposed to the actual responsible use of a herbicide. The issue around the aerial application is that nobody, whether it is the industry or government, has been able to put in place a mechanism to deal with complaints by adjacent landowners who are complaining of overspray.

It's not a complicated issue. No one has been able to answer that question. What do you do when a neighbouring landowner, in some cases not notified there is an application happening, cause I am one of them, and there is an overspray and they have a complaint? Some say we test the soil, some say we test the produce that they might be going to sell. In my case, there is an organic farmer who says he is oversprayed and there is nothing being done to verify whether there has been an overspray. This story has continued to have legs for a month, yet, we say it's okay to do an aerial application. You can't prove to adjacent landowners that they won't be sprayed. That's the crux of the issue. We say the environment is regulating it, yet they are not there all the time.

MR. PORTER: That was one of the measures we said. We also said in the applicator and the technology used in the application, and you can show it afterwards when you look at the photographs, and based on the reports from the Department of Environment they can test, and the reports show they are doing the testing.

MR. MCNEIL: We have an organic farmer who has the issue of being on an overspray, and we're a month later.

MR. PORTER: I can't speak to the time it takes to do tests. Some tests do take a long time to carry out - that's a question to propose to another group.

MR. TALBOT: My understanding is the Department of Environment and Labour is testing for that. That's the objective here, to determine whether or not there was an overspray and they're taking . . .

MR. MCNEIL: They're testing soil. He's selling produce, he's not selling soil. Test the produce, that's all they have to do.

MR. TALBOT: But you can determine with . . .

MR. MCNEIL: You're going in to knock down the hardwood. Obviously there's a visible sign that you've knocked down the hardwood when it goes in to spray it, right? Literature that's being put out by the government says you cannot detect this in the soil, yet they're testing the soil.

MR. TALBOT: But you can determine whether or not there's an overspray, based on the reaction of those pumpkins as to whether or not there was a spray applied.

MR. MCNEIL: So, why are we testing the soil?

MR. PORTER: That's a question for the Department of Environment.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. McNeil, thank you.

MR. HINES: I don't think there's any doubt that there are people demanding environmentally friendly practices; however I think the big demand is a proactive approach by all Parties to get good scientific information out there. When that good scientific information is out there, then I think the whole province or the whole country will feel better with the approach and that proper practices are being observed.

Again I allude to the fact that you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink. In this particular case there are members of the media who even admitted that they didn't have good scientific information, and they're the best investigators in the world. So I think the problem is that there has to be proactive information put out there, and if people don't choose to read it, observe it, and realize that the practices are prime, then they're the author of their own error.

I know when this thing came up and I chose to find out what I could about it, I certainly was able to find enough information, and the fact that I was involved in the forestry industry myself and have been satisfied that I was able to find the information made me comfortable with the use of Vision in aerial spraying. There are always those out there who are not going to accept any kind of information and I think we have to separate ourselves and our decision making from those individuals who don't desire or don't want to accept good practices that I think you people practise. I'm just putting that out there - make yourself available to the information that's available and make sure that it is scientifically proven information and there will be a whole lot more contentment around this.

The other thing I want to make a comment on is regarding the reaction to Hurricane Juan and cleanup practices. There was a commitment made by the federal minister to our minister, at the conference, that he would respond in very short order to the needs and to the questions being asked about federal participation in the programs that they are part of. We haven't heard back from him yet, so I think if you have people in your industry who are getting those same complaints you direct your complaints directly to the Honourable John Efford, because he did make a commitment in writing to our minister to respond and respond immediately. Thank you.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Ms. Massey, you're going to have to make this a short snapper. I'd like to have the members hang on for a second until we make a decision about our next presenter.

MS. MASSEY: I just wanted to reiterate - when I had asked the question of what effect the ending of the spraying of Vision would have on your harvest, I think you said something like it would affect the amount of wood being grown. That's not really the kind of detailed answer I was looking for. Anyway, maybe if you have more detailed information, you can give it to me at some other time.

I'm looking for that information at a later date if I can get it, Mr. Chairman.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Yes.

MR. PORTER: It would affect the amount being grown and therefore the amount that you could harvest. It would also affect the cost of the operation and that comes back to the side that this has to be run as a business.

MS. MASSEY: I would just like to see some numbers . . .

MR. TALBOT: We are actually trying to put those numbers together now to give basically a business perspective on what spraying or not spraying . . .

MS. MASSEY: And how that would affect more employees, that sort of thing, it would be great.

MR. TALBOT: Yes. When we come up with those, we can supply them.

MR. CHAIRMAN: As soon as that's available, could the committee have a copy?

MR. TALBOT: That can be available.

[11:00 a.m.]

MR. CHAIRMAN: I want to thank the Forest Products Association. Your information has really been helpful I think for the committee and I think you can see a wide variety of views and approaches, but in order for us to get clear understanding of the impacts of anything on the industry and some direction for where you would like to see government go in regard to the industry, these presentations are very helpful for us. So I want to say thank you very much and if you have some comments, if you want to use some up, Mr. Porter, I would be glad to hear them.

MR. PORTER: No, I think we've probably covered everything.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Well, thank you very much.

MR. PORTER: Thank you.

[11:01 a.m. The committee recessed.]

[11:06 a.m. The committee reconvened.]

MS. MORA STEVENS (Legislative Committee Coordinator): What I passed out was the old lists, that were sent in last year, of people the caucuses wanted to have come in before the committee, as well as the list of people we have had in over the last year. The Tory caucus sent me some additional ideas that they had. It's just that the only other approved item is Group Savoie, the Western Division, that's coming next month, but if we can get a few more items, because they need to plan. They need a good month or month and a half to be able to put together their presentations.

MR. GERALD SAMPSON: I have a request right now for a meeting with farmers in the Cape Breton County area. The co-operative with farmers in Inverness, would like to have a meeting with Chris d'Entremont, myself, Rodney MacDonald, Cecil Clarke, the MLAs from Cape Breton. I'm just wondering . . .

MR. CHAIRMAN: Is it the Enterprise Cape Breton . . .

MR. GERALD SAMPSON: No, it's not the Enterprise Cape Breton thing, it's just that there are no young farmers. It's the same as what you heard here today, there's no program in place as an incentive for young farmers to go into farming or even, not necessarily young farmers but immigrants or older people to enter the farming industry.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Is this the Cape Breton Federation of Agriculture, is that who you're talking about?

MR. GERALD SAMPSON: Yes, in combination with the Inverness Federation of Agriculture. I was just wondering, would it be possible, would I be allowed to invite them to come to the committee down the road?

MR. CHAIRMAN: Do you want us to talk to the Tories, Mr. Langille?

MR. LANGILLE: No, I don't have a problem with that. I know there are programs in place which would be better answered by the Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries. But if this is a federation, certainly, but if it's some individual farmers who want to come in, I don't know.

MR. GERALD SAMPSON: No, it's the Federation of Agriculture and I'm just wondering if the committee would consider that.

MR. CHAIRMAN: It's the Federation of Agriculture for Inverness or . . .

MR. GERALD SAMPSON: For Cape Breton. We'll say for Cape Breton. (Interruptions)

MR. PARKER: I was going to mention, we've had quite a few representatives from forestry lately and now we're talking about cattlemen or farmers here. I see on our list here the Canadian Council of Professional Fish Harvesters. We've had nobody in from the fishing industry lately that I can recall. (Interruptions) No, well, it's all aspects of fish harvesting. They're the Canadian Council of Professional Fish Harvesters and they represent all aspects of fishing. I think it would be nice to hear from the fishing industry. We haven't had them in in quite some time.

MR. CHAIRMAN: We'll take a vote. Let's see about the Cape Breton Federation of Agriculture.

MR. LANGILLE: If I may, Mr. Chairman, I would like to see the member go back and maybe have them send a letter requesting a meeting with us, just to see what they are about.

MR. PARKER: That might be an idea, because perhaps they might consider meeting with minister rather than us.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Well, we still need some information for Mora. She needs to give some lead time for the next group after Savoie.

MR. PARKER: I had that one suggestion, the fisheries.

MR. GERALD SAMPSON: Aquaculture is developing in my area. I would like to see something.

MR. PARKER: Well, that's a different group than the one I just suggested.

MR. GERALD SAMPSON: We could have two. We could have the fishery harvesters and then down the road we could have aquaculture. There's aquaculture province-wide.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Do we have an Aquaculture Association, there still is one, I think?

MS. STEVENS: Yes, there is an Aquaculture Association. They used to come on a fairly regular basis years ago, before this committee, from what I understand.

MR. CHAIRMAN: That's not necessarily going to address your . . .

MR. PARKER: No, this is a different group, but that's an idea for another meeting.

MR. GERALD SAMPSON: We could have two. We've had several from the forestry industry, we could have two from the fishing industry.

MR. CHAIRMAN: We're just trying to determine what's the next one. That's what we're trying to figure out. (Interruptions)

MR. GERALD SAMPSON: Two separate times.

MS. STEVENS: If you give me a couple, then I can . . .

MR. CHAIRMAN: Yes, why don't we give them to you, and you have to contact them to find out whether anybody can come anyway. Can we go with the council? I'll give you two to go with, the Acadian Council of Professional Fish Harvesters and the Aquaculture Association and see which one of those. Is that fine with the committee?

SOME HON. MEMBER: Yes.

MR. GERALD SAMPSON: Can I give Mora an address to send a letter to this gentleman who is requesting a meeting of all of us to see if they're interested in coming before the Resources Committee?

MR. CHAIRMAN: That would be fine. Thank you, gentlemen, I appreciate that.

[11:11 a.m. The committee adjourned.]