HANSARD

Printed and Published by Nova Scotia Hansard Reporting Services

Mr. John MacDonell (Chairman)

Hon. Barry Barnet

Mr. Patrick Dunn

Mr. Ernest Fage

Mr. Sterling Belliveau

Mr. Clarrie MacKinnon

Mr. Wayne Gaudet

Mr. Leo Glavine

Mr. Harold Theriault

[Mr. Sterling Belliveau was replaced by Mr. Leonard Preyra]

In Attendance:

Ms. Rhonda Neatt

Legislative Committee Clerk

Friends of Point Pleasant Park

Dr. Iain Taylor, President

Ms. Stephanie Robertson, Vice-President

Mr. Chris Majka, Associate

Lawrencetown/Cole Harbour Citizens Action Committee

Ms. Carol O'Neil, Chair

Dr. Donald Grady, Member of the Executive Committee

Ecology Action Centre

Ms. Joanne Cook, Standing Tall Campaign Coordinator

HALIFAX, TUESDAY, JUNE 5, 2007

STANDING COMMITTEE ON RESOURCES

9:00 A.M.

CHAIRMAN

Mr. John MacDonell

Vice-Chairman

Mr. Wayne Gaudet

MR. CHAIRMAN: Good morning. I want to welcome you to the Resources Committee. It's the usual format, and I'm thinking that you're aware of it anyway, but the members of the committee will introduce themselves, then I would like you to introduce yourselves and then you can go right into your presentation. We have two hours, so whatever time you think you need, and then the members would like to have some questions.

[ The committee members introduced themselves.]

MR. CHAIRMAN: Go ahead, whoever is first.

DR. IAIN TAYLOR: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My name is Iain Taylor and I guess I am the master of ceremonies this morning for the people up here, because we have an assorted cast of characters who are here to entertain and inform, we hope.

On the way in, I was trying to think of a snappy metaphor that would cover what we have to say today, because we were here in April to hear the CFIA's presentation and our presentation this morning really dovetails onto that, dovetailing not from the point of view of agreement but more the mirror image of that - the images that came to my mind were that of David and Goliath, and you see before you several Davids and female versions thereof.

[9:15 a.m.]

The Goliaths had their opportunity in April - big federal government department with millions of dollars to spend - to try and convince you of certain things and policies which we believe have been misguided right from the start, and we'll attempt to tell you why we, as a small group of concerned citizens, starting out initially in Halifax but more recently spreading our interest and expertise that we've gained over the last few years with our friends from the Eastern Shore, as they have faced some of these other questions arising from the initial outburst of activity and concern seven years ago.

The other image that came to mind, besides that of David and Goliath, was of the little boy and the emperor with no clothes. If you recall that story, the emperor's finest were admired by everybody who was too frightened to tell him that he was naked as he walked down the street, until the little boy put up his hand and asked, why has the Emperor got no clothes on? Well I guess we're the little boys here, and girls, and the emperor again is the big federal department that you've heard from.

We've also had a letter, which I guess represents official Nova Scotia Government policy, from Minister David Morse, further to a letter that we had sent him. He replied on May 4^th, essentially agreeing that what the CFIA has done has the backing, at least officially, of the government - and I suppose that's where the situation sits officially at this point. It's our purpose here today to try to get you to give that some second thoughts and to give some further advice to the minister as to how he may now review the situation and look at it in a new light.

Let me just kick off by introducing my colleagues here: the Vice-President of the Friends of Point Pleasant Park, Stephanie Robertson on my left, and she'll be talking to you in a minute or two; and Joanne Cook on my right, who if you see her with a slightly forced smile, it's not any ill will that she bears anyone in the room, she's just had a very bad back problem from chasing trees in the forest over the weekend.

MS. JOANNE COOK: I'm just fine. (Laughter)

DR. TAYLOR: She's the director of the appropriately titled Standing Tall campaign - which I think is probably very good medicine for someone with a bad back - at the Ecology Action Centre and she's here to talk to you about the overall provincial and perhaps national, and possibly international, situation which has been triggered by this problem.

Just let me say if I may, before I hand the floor over, a little bit about our background. We are a relatively small group which assembled to try to critique some of the policies which were put into play in the year 2000. Personally, my Ph.D. is in geography and I spent 10 years in Nova Scotia and in Ottawa as, most recently, the director of the Environmental Sustainable Resources program, before I took an early retirement. Prior to that, I was chief

geographer for the federal government in Ottawa, and prior to that, I taught at university out West, in Alberta.

Scientists and other people - of which, as Leonard will bear out, there is quite a large number on the peninsula of Halifax, and very concerned about what goes on - came together because we thought the initial response by CFIA would not have gotten a passing grade in an ordinary science project that was handed in. There were so many problems with it that we felt we had to stand tall and try to point those out. Ultimately, we tried to do that in court and so on - but we won't revisit all of that.

Since then we have been "Waiting for Godot" in a sense - waiting for CFIA to deliver on some of the hard science that we've been promised over the years, to try to see what, in fact, has really happened with this BSLB. I hope you don't mind the letters, it contracts about a one-minute description, particularly if you add in the Latin description, to four letters. More recently, as this program has radically shifted, I think everybody would have to agree with the decision made just in the last few months, essentially to stop fighting this bug and to try to contain it in some way, has led to other concerns too.

Our main pitch is to try to help you work your way through some of the science here to try to get you to look at it afresh and not to accept necessarily all that has been given to you. We want to open your eyes to some new ways of viewing things, and essentially to try to see how much of a real problem this is and whether we, as Nova Scotian taxpayers, or as federal taxpayers, should be pumping large amounts of money into this, or continuing to pump large amounts of money into this and damaging the lives of various people in the province at the same time. So that is our intent this morning, and I will come back at the end to try to wrap up. Hopefully, we'll do this fairly efficiently and give you as much time as we can to ask any questions. (Interruption)

I'm sorry, yes, I'm very sorry - Don Grady has reminded me that they are here with the Lawrencetown/Cole Harbour Citizens Action Committee, if I've got that description correct. I did refer to you sort of indirectly, but not by name. Anyway, that said, I'm going to pass you over to Stephanie Robertson now, who is an independent scientist who has been working on the questions of beetles and insects, particularly in this part of Nova Scotia, for the last couple of decades, I guess. She was the first to actually scientifically identify the BSLB when it came up in a collection now over 16 or 17 years ago, so she is well qualified to speak to this.

MS. STEPHANIE ROBERTSON: You took away my introduction.

As Iain said, I'm Stephanie Robertson and I got involved in this really years ago, in 1989, when I did that study, influenced - and I have to say sadly - by the forestry industry because when I did my study I, too, just collected the type of beetle that the forestry industry was looking for, and I didn't do a wider spectrum of collection. But I couldn't resist

collecting 17 very different looking beetles, and I didn't identify them actually, they were sent to Ottawa and misidentified there first, and only identified correctly ten years later by - I forget whether the Canadian Forest Service, or whatever.

The main thing is that my study was prompted because we saw in the paper suddenly that 10,000 trees in the park had to be cut down because there are all these sap tubes, and somebody came in from the forestry industry, didn't do a study, looked at the sap tubes and said, you've got the spruce bark beetle, you have to cut all these trees down. I didn't think that was quite right, so I did the study. As you may or may not know, there wasn't one spruce bark beetle in the park - zero - we had lots of other bark beetles, but not that one.

So ten years later when I saw the headlines in the paper that there are all these sap tubes in the park and this beetle has been identified, and we have to cut down the trees because of all these sap tubes, I thought this is just the same old stuff again. So that is how I got involved and it has been haunting me ever since - I can't escape it.

There we are on the screen - I haven't done this before, so we might have some surprises. First, I would like you to look at the diversity of opinion between the Friends of Point Pleasant Park and the CFIA back in 2000. Now remember, this is seven years ago, and you see the differences, we're the exact opposite in what they were saying about the park - there are millions of these beetles in the park; they're attacking and killing healthy trees; no natural predators; and they have to be eradicated. Of course we were the opposite - it's only one of many; they aren't attacking and killing healthy spruce; many different predators and parasites are there; and they can't be eradicated.

The next slide will illustrate our assertions that you see in this slide. Between 2000 and 2005, we collected a broad spectrum of insects and beetles in Point Pleasant Park and here is what we found - if you look carefully you will see on the left the long horn beetles and there are the jewel beetles and bark beetles, and all of these beetles do exactly the same thing as the brown spruce longhorn beetle. There are 36 in total and only one of those is the brown spruce longhorn beetle.

This is really important because if you eradicated, contained the brown spruce longhorn beetle it doesn't matter, you have 35 others doing exactly the same thing. This is an important omission in the CFIA's information as well - namely, what other wood decomposing insects, if any, have they collected? How can their research be complete if they're not getting the full picture? We wanted to get the full picture rather than my very narrow study ten years ago - and they haven't released that information. So they have just released information about the brown spruce longhorn beetle itself.

Here is a slide that shows in the same studies how many parasites and predators there are that will attack the brown spruce longhorn beetle and all those other spruce-feeding beetles, and there are nineteen - there are thirteen predators and they actually attack the

larvae and the adults, and six parasites and they actually lay their eggs in the larvae and then, of course, you probably have seen those films on TV where these things lay eggs in caterpillars and - it's quite disgusting - they eat out the caterpillar and the poor caterpillar is still semi-alive and that's what happens.

MR. TAYLOR: That was Alien, wasn't it? (Laughter)

MS. ROBERTSON: Now, of course, we said all along that these predators and parasites were there. The CFIA said no, they're not, which is interesting because they have access and they commission science from the forestry industry that, we hope, have access to millions of insect studies that go back a long time - so that is quite interesting.

Now, remember the difference of opinion we just saw back in 2000? Here is what the media releases were stating between our opinions in 2007. After seven years, millions of dollars, and a lot of hardship to landowners and Nova Scotia forests, here's how our opinions compare now.

Now on May 15^th you were here - most of you were here, I think there are a few missing - and we heard somebody from CFIA say that the brown spruce longhorn beetle was attacking trees of low vigour; they had changed their stance. They also said that Hurricane Juan provided an ideal opportunity for the BSLB to multiply. Now if their preferred host is healthy trees, and this whole expensive program was started because of that, why would Hurricane Juan provide an ideal opportunity for them to multiply in dead and dying trees all over the place?

This admits to what we have said all along - there's just no evidence in anything that they've said and have provided to us that the BSLB is attacking healthy trees, which is what they've based their actions on. If it did exhibit this behaviour, then the hurricane wouldn't have presented an ideal opportunity.

They also said, where is there a healthy forest in Nova Scotia? Well, where is there? This is, to me, a very important question. If the BSLB is inconsequential to healthy trees and our Nova Scotia forests are in decline for other reasons, shouldn't this be looked into? Why isn't it being - why aren't they looking into it? This is part of the larger picture that we think is very important.

[9:30 a.m.]

Here's a summary of what we are saying about the BSLB and the CFIA's eradication containment program. As we have said, the BSLB is only one of 36 species with exactly the same eating habits. We feel that the CFIA research is incomplete, poorly focused science. It provides no evidence that the BSLB is a pest and no evidence that it is attacking healthy

spruce. Of course they paid all that money and attracted, with all their brouhaha, the attention of U.S. interests.

Now the CFIA did do some research - of course they don't do it themselves, they commission this research - and there were four detection studies that detect for the BSLB; four for control mechanisms; two for fungal associates, and there are some funguses that are associated with the BSLB, this really just kind of introduces some stain into the wood and if you wanted wood without stain - I think of it as Danish blue cheese, it introduces this blue stain into the wood; one study was done on host preferences; and one on parasites, and that was quite an interesting one. They did a study measuring the number of parasites that attacked, and they picked two - one was a braconid wasp, and the other was a ichneumon wasp - and they found that they reduced, they attacked the BSLB and the other beetles. One had a 5 to 50-some per cent success rate, a 56 per cent rate, and the other, 0 to 25 per cent success rate.

Now that was an important bit of information, but that study was cut off, was attenuated, when the CFIA cut all the trees down - they couldn't then finish that interesting and important study.

Then they did one on tree health - somebody from New Brunswick came in with a graduate student and did a small study on tree health and came to the conclusion that stressed trees are more susceptible to this beetle, but they didn't say so at the time, they still insisted that it was attacking healthy trees.

So the essential and the most important research to establish whether or not the BSLB is a pest just hasn't been done, and it should have been - for all that time and money we think it should have been and we hope that you think it should have been, too. After seven years it's clear that the BSLB is not attacking healthy trees and the CFIA and the Friends of Point Pleasant Park agree on that.

Here's what we feel is a solution - we'd like you to show that the CFIA's science is misdirected and there's no BSLB problem. Please, members of the Resources Committee, we hope you have influence. We are asking strongly that you support a call for a scientific inquiry and appoint a commissioner to delve into this fully. The inauguration of this deleterious and destructive, drastic BSLB program seven years ago was a political decision. You are the experts here in this field, so please make the decision to stop the CFIA's BSLB program in Nova Scotia, a political decision as well. Thank you.

DR. TAYLOR: As I say, there will be plenty of time for questions in just a minute, and I'm sure you have several.

MS. JOANNE COOK: Hello, everyone. As Iain said, I'm Joanne Cook, I'm one of the coordinators of the Standing Tall: Forests for Life Campaign of the Ecology Action Centre, along with my colleague, Minga O'Brien, in the brown over there.

As those of you who have heard Minga and me speak before know, one of our major focuses has been on working with private woodlot owners, and with government policy aimed at private woodlot owners in Nova Scotia, to encourage healthy forests and responsible stewardship of our lands. So I'm coming at the BSLB issue, not from the straight science side - though we certainly support everything that the Friends of Point Pleasant Park have said - but rather at the impacts that we've seen particularly over the past year that the CFIA's actions have had on woodlot management.

Our woodlot owners are facing many challenges right now. I'm going to quickly just review for you the latest economic and financial information about the forest sector, just to frame that, and then I'm going to talk about the impacts of quarantines and feared quarantines.

There's no question that the forest sector in Canada is in deep, deep trouble. When a group like the Conference Board of Canada - normally a very conservative organization - comes out and says it's a state of absolute disaster, you know things are bad. We've had a least 35 pulp and paper mills shut across Canada since mid-2004, and there have been over 40,000 jobs lost in the sector in the last five years. Returns on investment, returns on capital expenditures are very low - they're running somewhere between 2 and 2.5 per cent at the moment - and now we are seeing the contraction in the last six months has expanded out of pulp and paper to our eastern sawmill sector. There have been something like 6,000 to 8,000 jobs lost in Ontario and Quebec alone in sawmilling over the past year.

This isn't a localized Canadian problem, it's a global restructuring of this industry. We have some specific drivers like the high Canadian dollar - Report on Business, today for example, has a lead article on the impact of exchange rates on the resources sector, projecting yet more contractions in forest products. The sector is facing rising energy and fuel costs - as you certainly know, that was one of the major issues around Stora Enso's continued operation, the question of electricity rates. More severely, though, production is moving offshore because of the economies of scale and economies of employment costs. In China, Uruguay, southern Brazil, southern Russia, there are huge high-efficiency mills, very low labour rates, and very cheap wood supplies. In northern Uruguay, you can grow a eucalyptus seedling from Australia - from seed to pulp log - in six years. We can't match that kind of cheap fibre.

Newsprint demand in the developed world is falling, down somewhere between 20 and 25 per cent in North America over the past decade as people shift to television and the Internet for their news. Now we are seeing the U.S. housing bubble deflating rapidly and the demand for softwood lumber is going down along with it, at the same time as there is a glut

on the market of cheap saw logs from B.C. as they scramble to salvage what they can from the millions of hectares killed by the pine beetle. So all of this is a perfect storm that is hitting our industry here.

Employment in the Atlantic forest industry is down 25 per cent in the last two years - you can see that the red line is wood products, the black solid line is primary forestry, the dotted line is pulp and paper, and they are all down together. We aren't immune here. I spoke with DNR yesterday, they're not quite at the point of being able to release actual figures for 2006, but they've seen a substantial drop in the amount of wood harvested, 2007 to date, even farther down. Production has started to drop in the last half of 2006, and they have a very, very grim view of matters in the production sector for this year.

As a result of all of these things, our forest industry employment in Nova Scotia has dropped almost 40 per cent - that's Nova Scotia, the grey bar with the red arrow pointing to it - in just the last two years, and there appears to be no end in sight. This has huge impacts on the people whose forests our wood supply comes from. We are down to about 8,000 people actually working in the forest sector, we still however have 30,000 individual woodlot owners supplying 70 per cent of our wood supply and owning a little more than half of our actual forest acreage. These are the people who are the stewards of our forest lands, and they are facing a grim and tight future.

Here in the HRM - and I'm using the HRM because that has been the primary quarantine area - only 0.6 per cent of all HRM jobs are in forestry, but because we have such a large population base compared to other counties, because we have so many actual jobs, the number of people we have working in the forest industry in absolute terms is actually somewhere between 10 and 12 per cent of everyone working in forestry in the province. The actual absolute number of jobs in the HRM is second only to Lunenburg County.

So although it looks like it's a very minor part of our economic sector here, it actually impacts an awful lot of people, and we have a lot of forest-based businesses - silviculture contractors, management planners, small and very large sawmills, like MacTara, which is the largest sawmill in Nova Scotia.

So woodlot owners in the HRM, and the sector as a whole, have faced a triple whammy in the last few years: There has been the overall decline that I've just described in the forest products sector; there is the impact of Hurricane Juan, which, although not as widespread as many might think - if you look at the actual area of woodlots that were between 30 and 100 per cent wiped out by Juan, it is only 5 per cent of the actual hurricane swath, but that's small comfort to those woodlot owners who were in that 5 per cent devastation; then on top of that there has been the BSLB quarantine that has been actually in place, that has impacted strongly on woodlot owners in the Eastern Shore, Lawrencetown area - and you will be hearing from them shortly; and, more strongly, the fears of the expanded quarantine that CFIA started talking about last year.

So you have had a shaky industry struggling to stay profitable and alive with a federal agency that threw yet another crisis into the works. Those quarantine issues, those fears of the quarantine and the actual impact on woodlot owners probably created more problems than this beetle itself ever did. You've seen from the presentation of the Friends of Point Pleasant Park, how small a percentage of beetles that have been collected have actually been BSLB at the very epicentre of this supposed epidemic in Point Pleasant Park.

The effects of the quarantine on mills, on woodlot owners, on conservation groups, who were terrified that potential protected areas might get logged has been ridiculous, and the amount of public hysteria out there has been ridiculous. We've seen intense pressured clear-cut on many woodlot owners whose lands lay within the projected new quarantine zone.

[9:45 a.m.]

I had a long talk with Robin Barrett from Barrett Lumber and he told me they were getting calls every week from woodlot owners within the potential quarantine zone saying, come and take my trees before they're worthless, and he was trying to talk people out of clear-cutting their lands, without success. There is something terribly wrong when a softwood lumber sawmill is trying to tell people not to cut their spruce.

Clear-cuts - I'm going to be really fast about this because you all know the Ecology Action Centre's position on this, I don't have to belabour it. Clear-cuts wipe out our natural, healthy Acadian forest. We've been cutting over 200 football fields a day for almost ten years now. When you clear-cut mixed Acadian forest, you don't get it back, because you don't get the shade- tolerance species, like sugar maples, back. Clear-cuts aren't a way of mimicking natural disturbances in our forests here, and clear-cuts have impacts on water supplies, groundwater flows, surface-water flows, they destroy wildlife and fish habitat, and there are huge impacts from greenhouse gas emissions. The largest terrestrial source of greenhouse gas that has been located so far was a clear-cut studied by Queen's University. Our Acadian forest is not in good shape - I'm not going to belabour that.

So 98 per cent of what we do is clear-cutting in this province, and this is a graph that shows you from 1975 up through to 2004 the hectares of wood that we've logged - the blue line is the total, the red line is clear-cutting. We're completely out of whack here. As far as we are concerned at EAC, anything that encourages clear-cutting is a very bad thing.

So we've seen panic among woodlot owners, we've seen woodlot owners who ignored their own management plans and rushed to cut ahead of a new imposed quarantine. Over half of our forest land is in the hands of private woodlot owners. We depend on these people to have a healthy forest in this province. Governments need to encourage woodlot owners to take a long view of the stewardship in their lands, not encourage rash, short-

sighted decisions out of fear that your timber is suddenly going to be worthless - and it is criminal what the CFIA did, absolutely criminal.

So I want to support the Friends of Point Pleasant Park and the Lawrencetown landowners in their call for an independent science review. In their call for you, across Parties, as politicians who care about the future of this province to get the Department of Natural Resources onside; to call for an objective review of the science around the BSLB controversy; to work with the feds to bring some sanity to this process, disentangle us from the CFIA; and to see transparent decision making around this that affects people's livelihoods and the environmental health of our forests. We need predictability, we need transparency, and we need to avoid any more panic on this issue. Thank you very much.

DR. TAYLOR: Some very strong points there, and no doubt you'll wish to ask some questions about them later.

On my right and about to switch places, and while she's doing that I'll introduce you to Carol O'Neil who is with the Lawrencetown/Cole Harbour Citizens Action Committee. She's here to talk to you about the impact on the people of the Eastern Shore whose livelihoods have been severely impacted and affected by CFIA decisions and by decisions that the small- woodlot owners have tried to make or have had to make as a result of those policies.

MS. CAROL O'NEIL: Thank you. Good morning, and thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today. Iain is right, I'm here t bring you the view of the people who live in the area most affected by the double whammy or the triple whammy of this CFIA quarantine zone and the impact of Hurricane Juan. So just to remind you - and I'm sure you don't need reminding, but it so happens . . .

MR. CHAIRMAN: Ms. O'Neil, would you introduce yourself into the mic, please, just for our recording . . .

MS. O'NEIL: I'm sorry. I'm Carol O'Neil from the Lawrencetown/Cole Harbour Citizens Action Committee, and I'm going to show you a few pictures in a minute. In 2000, when the CFIA imposed the ministerial order on the territory surrounding Point Pleasant Park, those of us who lived in what would become known as the BSLB quarantine zone - which is an area of 828- square kilometres - understood that the Government of Canada had a responsibility to protect the country from the potential damage of alien pests, and that in implementing the measures to control the movement of wood which could contain the beetle the CFIA was perhaps erring on the side of caution until they could determine the exact nature of the threat. So that's what we felt in 2000, in general terms.

When you grow trees, you take the long view. It's not as if the row of carrots will disappear; it's a different approach to growing produce, so to speak. For those of us who had

standing wood ready for harvest, this meant we felt we'd wait until things got sorted out - and we had some faith that things would be sorted out. Since our particular property had been inspected two or three times since 2000, by CFIA, and they found no trace whatsoever of the beetle, we fully expected that we would be given permission to harvest in the not too distant future.

When Hurricane Juan hit in September of 2003, we in Lawrencetown and Cole Harbour came to understand more fully the impact of the ministerial order. You should understand that our communities lie in the eastern edge of the eye of the hurricane, which produces the highest winds and the greatest damage, and there was severe damage in our communities. The forests were decimated, many areas of the forests, but unlike landowners who lived a few miles away, outside the boundary of the quarantine zone, we were prevented from doing anything to clean up the downed trees, absolutely prevented.

As time dragged on, nothing was being done to assist us, and both large and small landowners were increasingly anxious about the severe threat of forest fire as the downed trees dried out. We were also concerned about the absence of any means whatsoever to harvest the trees - remember, the CFIA restrictions were so draconian that no one was coming into the quarantine area to harvest. Of course we were concerned about the devastating impact, the economic impact on landowners, both small and large, who had no means to harvest the downed trees and have some economic return for those downed trees, to, at a minimum, pay for the cleanup.

I just want to remind you that it so happened that we were out - these pictures were taken on our property, and I use our property because we happen to have pictures of those, but there are many other properties like this in our communities - this is late in the afternoon just hours before Hurricane Juan struck. These are photographs of the beagle and some of the trees, the ocean mainly, looking up into the forest. When I say "our property", I mean we belong to a co-operative owned by three households, three families, and we own the land collectively and own our houses individually. This is one of the houses on the co-operative lands just hours before Juan hit on September 28^th, and this was yesterday - you can see the difference. The trees are gone around the house and a more startling picture is this one, that is looking back on the other side of this house and this land and land adjacent to it is all bare. This is where our forests went.

Another house on the property on the day - this is the day, again, just hours before the hurricane hit - late in the afternoon and, subsequent, this is yesterday and the forest is gone. Even more startling I guess, this is an aerial view from DNR - after the hurricane DNR did an aerial survey of the lands to try to identify the damage to the forests - the greyish areas in the photograph, they indicate, and you probably can't see them too well, but you'll see in a minute what I mean by this, and this again is part of our property, about 100 acres here, this is what is gone now, that's the hurricane damage we suffered, so forests and what was left after the hurricane.

I should point out that even in some of the standing wood, well for two years after the hurricane, whenever there was a high wind we'd just sit in the house and listen to the thump, thump, thump, as the trees continued to fall on the edges - so we've had more damage than this.

Also in this photo - maybe I'll just point out this area here represents a woodlot that was planted by us, every tree by our own hands a little over 20 years ago, and it survived because it was hidden and protected by some of the older forests around it.

This is what is left - and I'll just explain a little bit about the harvest - because the conditions of the ministerial order were so stringent that no forestry contractor or mill would agree to even seek CFIA certification to handle wood within the quarantine zone, so in effect after the hurricane it was not possible for us to sell the wood since it couldn't be transported out of the quarantine area. Even if a contractor could have been persuaded to bring in harvesting machinery - and that's what was needed, you've all seen the tangled mess of the woods after the hurricane - the landowner would have had to pay to have the wood cut and then would have to leave it on-site. There was nowhere for us to put the debris from the hurricane. Keep in mind this was not garbage - this was fibre, a fibre resource and there are people here today for whom that represented retirement income and that disappeared on that day.

Some people with smaller lots and deeper pockets were able to hire a few small independent people to come in to do a little bit of cleanup and chip the wood and leave it where it lay, but the cost of doing that kind of thing was well beyond the means of most of the people in our community - extremely expensive, and you still had the fibre there.

Even small landowners had extreme difficulty in dealing with the trees destroyed on their land and many of them waited for over a year before HRM agreed to provide extra brush pickup so people could at least get rid of the downed limbs, trees and trunks that were on their lots. Keep in mind as well that many of the homes in our community are surrounded by forest, so we have small subdivisions or individual houses that are generally surrounded by forest, so even when people cleaned up their own yard and were able to dispose of the hurricane debris, that did little to alleviate the extreme fire hazard that was posed by the downed wood on larger nearby properties.

I think that was the primary concern of the people in the community - we were told that the amount of fuel on the ground was even greater than what was found in Point Pleasant Park for example, and that we were in danger, our community was very much in danger. Should a fire break out, it would spread very quickly and with devastating results.

So we turned to the federal government for assistance and we proposed a number of very practical measures that would both provide the means to harvest and process the damaged wood and maintain the protection against the spread of the BSLB . We were met

with stony silence. It took months to receive a reply to a letter which merely said, sorry, the program is what it is and we're doing nothing more to help you.

[10:00 a.m.]

Fortunately, then the Province of Nova Scotia, through the Department of Natural Resources, stepped in to provide some assistance by negotiating with Neenah Paper to harvest and chip, on-site, the largest areas of downed forests. The province agreed to subsidize Neenah for the extra costs involved in harvesting the wood within the quarantined zone, because of course there were extra costs involved. This is something the federal government refused to do - the extra costs were as a direct result of the quarantine and the federal government refused any assistance whatsoever, nothing, zero.

Neenah Paper agreed to pay the landowners, so Neenah came in and we were warned that this was a large industrial forestry operation, we were told, which really - how can I say this? - it really offended us who felt we were stewards of the land and wanted to practice responsible forestry, but we had no choice. We had no choice but to accept the only option we had to clean up the dead and dying trees all around us that, frankly, we were nervous about and our neighbours were nervous about, saying, when are you going to clean this up, we're afraid of fire. So we accepted a deal for Neenah Paper to come in, harvest the downed trees and we were paid about $5 a ton for the chips, they chipped on-site, and that was the only method the CFIA would approve - the only method of harvesting within the quarantine zone that CFIA would approve.

Essentially we, and others, received far below what the value of the wood would have been had the CFIA restrictions not been in place, and far below what other woodlot owners who also had hurricane-damaged trees were receiving - they were able to recoup more for their hurricane-damaged resource.

To date, only between 50 and 75 per cent of the larger woodlots on the original list have been harvested, so we have one harvesting company able to come in that was approved by CFIA and they have still been unable to complete the work because of a combination of not enough frost in the ground, because we've had milder winters, and the fact that they're doing this outside of their regular operating procedures - so it has been an extremely frustrating experience.

Almost four years later, the wood isn't even good for chips. More recently a smaller harvester, who has recently been approved or is seeking approval from CFIA, was working in the area and said that what is happening now is because there is little value left in the hurricane-damaged trees, in order to pay for the cleanup of the hurricane-damaged trees they are now having to cut standing timber, get the value of the standing timber. So they have to go to landowners and say, yes, we can come in and clean up your hurricane-damaged trees but it's going to cost you, and the way you are going to pay for that is now we're going to

have to cut some standing timber so that there will be some income to pay for the cleanup. Again, none of this would have happened - in other areas, not in the quarantine, people were able to come in, clean up the downed timber, the timber damaged from the hurricane - we didn't have that luxury in the quarantine zone.

To date, because of this large industrial forestry operation, this is what the land looks like, there are still many, many upturned trunks. They came in, they did it quickly, they had machinery in, machinery out. We asked, can you at least tilt the trunks of the trees up, because they were all uprooted? No, we can't do that, we'll do a little bit, maybe if we are passing by we might hit one with the machine.

The land is devastated and our hearts are really broken when we look at the land - and this was after the Neenah harvest. Again, these pictures were taken yesterday, so you do see some greenery, and these are grasses and perhaps some small hardwoods that are coming up in certain areas, but there are large areas where the actual chipping operation was done and there's nothing growing there, absolutely nothing growing in those areas - still lots of debris and higgledy-piggledy, and it's going to be very difficult to get the land in shape for replanting. We can see little or no natural regeneration - that is, there doesn't seem to be much softwood coming up. We have cut other areas in the past where we've had a fairly significant natural regeneration and that's not happening in the areas that were hurricane damaged and then harvested by Neenah.

We were fortunate to have our forests cleaned up because, again, our biggest fear was the fire threat. We've certainly taken a big economic hit as a result of the CFIA's quarantine zone and Hurricane Juan; it has been a significant hit, but we are, again, among the more fortunate. There is still this tangled mass of trees and I'm sure you've all seen many, many pictures of this, and seen it in person - there are still far too many areas in our communities where this exists, so there is still a very significant forest fire threat.

We have had a number of community meetings, and some of the people on your committee have actually been kind enough to attend, and now we're entering our fourth year of efforts to cause our political representatives in the bureaucracy and in the federal government to act in a way which is appropriate in support of its citizens.

What the citizens of Lawrencetown and Cole Harbour desperately need is your committee's support in moving the Government of Nova Scotia to appoint an independent, non-partisan commissioner to examine the basis for seven years of what we consider wrong-headed action by the CFIA and the federal government. So we join here with the Ecology Action Centre and the Friends of Point Pleasant Park in calling for this review and, in addition, we ask once again for your assistance in implementing a realistic and timely process to complete the cleanup of the hurricane-damaged woodlands.

Once again we put to you the request for fair compensation for landowners who were forced by the CFIA's mishandling of the hurricane-caused crisis to essentially give away their wood fibre for a tiny fraction of its market value. Remember please that the CFIA's extension of the borders of the ministerial order is underway and could continue until all of the woodlands of mainland Nova Scotia are quarantined, I suppose. So we do need the Government of Nova Scotia to step up, once again, to provide the necessary oversight to CFIA and to ensure that the citizens of Nova Scotia are no longer ignored by the federal government.

The way that we have been treated by the federal government in a time of severe crisis is shameful - nothing less than shameful - and we look to you, the government that is closest to us, to intercede on our behalf and on behalf of the citizens of Nova Scotia. Thank you.

DR. TAYLOR: I will just, in a very quick minute, draw together a couple of points from the presentations, but before I do that I would just like to introduce, behind me, Chris Majka, who came into the room without me noticing. I'm sure Stephanie will join with me in mentioning that Chris has been more than a partner in preparing the scientific evidence which Stephanie presented earlier on, and as an independent scientist with many publications in the area of insects and beetles - he is one of Eastern Canada's leading experts in this area, and we're very grateful to have had his assistance in preparing our presentation.

What you've heard today from the science, from the overview of the economics, from the impact on ordinary citizens who had hoped to look after and to preserve and sensibly take from the forest in the Eastern Shore over the next few years is, I think, a crushing indictment of how governmental agencies can sometimes, perhaps with the best will in the world, still end up rolling over citizens and making bad decisions.

We think the decisions have not been made on the basis of proper science. We said that seven years ago, but we were willing to listen and to be persuaded. Seven years have produced no evidence which has caused us to change our point of view from where it was in 2000, and we're asking for a review - I mean, you're not scientists - where, in the room, we need to ask a lot more questions about what this is and why this has been going on, because it is going to go on. CFIA has thrown in the towel and have admitted as such in terms of eradication, but their policies are still affecting Nova Scotians and it's based on no science that we can understand that selects the BSLB as one of these many insect species that breaks down sick or dying trees.

And just to reiterate that - it's like the wolves on the edge of the caribou pack, they go after the ones who are old, and sick or the ones who are young and stumbling, and they pick them off, and that's exactly what they're supposed to do in nature. They've been designed that way, they've acted that way for millennia in Eurasia, and they arrived here - perhaps it would be best that they didn't arrive here - but just remember everything has

arrived here. We were covered with ice several tens of thousands feet thick a few thousand years ago, and every single living thing in this province, as a species, has arrived here from someplace else in that period of time.

Now that globalization is speeding up this process, and we don't need to let our guard down, but in chasing after a chimera like this we are in effect diverting resources that should be used in combatting real pests which would have real effects on our environments and economy, and this is not one of them. So that is what we ask you today - you, as legislators, are responsible for the natural resources of this province by our Constitution, the federal government is not. The federal government does have certain responsibilities when it comes to alien species, but they don't look after our forests. The Government of Nova Scotia sets the policies to do that, and we ask that you, in this case, exert that authority. Thank you.

MR. CHAIRMAN: I want to start by saying thanks very much, excellent presentations from all of you. We have a speaker's list, and Mr. MacKinnon is at the top of the list.

MR. CLARRIE MACKINNON: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I'm very impressed with the presentations, and sympathize and agree with many of the points that have been made. One of the concerns that I have is when we talk about one of thirty-six beetles, and we say it is just one of thirty-six, when we talk about the damage being done by the pine beetle in B.C., we don't say it is just one of X number of beetles involved, but the brown spruce longhorn beetle, is it capable of doing much more damage than the other thirty-five that are out there? I mean, why is there this tremendous fear about this one beetle, in comparison to the others?

DR. TAYLOR; That's a very good question and the analogy is a very good one, and I'll pass you over to somebody who can answer the technical side of it. I don't think we should get these things mixed up. What we've got in B.C. is an outbreak of a natural beetle which has been caused essentially, I understand, by climatic problems - without the cold to kill it off. In the kind of uniform stands that have been allowed to develop, when something like it gets out of control it affects everything.

We have no evidence whatsoever to see that happening here. When we're looking at absolute numbers of insects - which have not been tallied properly by CFIA and we certainly haven't had the resources to do it - what we find is this broad array of insects which are doing similar kinds of things, but what we don't see are whole areas of devastation where this one particular beetle is in a massive majority and is doing that work. It is always found in association with these others. Maybe Stephanie, you would want to comment on that.

MS. ROBERTSON: Well, I do have some feelings about this. The real fear is because it is an introduced pest, that's what they say, and what will it do here. Well, my feeling, and they always point to the zebra mussel - well the zebra mussel comes from very different

climatic conditions. It comes from Asia and it's no wonder there were no predators here for that animal because it is in a really new situation. Now the brown spruce longhorn beetle comes from Europe, in exactly the same conditions as we have here. It is that broad band of temperate forest around the world and it is just the same conditions. So there is nothing to indicate to me, personally, that it is going to explode, and it hasn't.

[10:15 a.m.]

Where are the millions of beetles? They can't find them. When we met with the people at Ramada Inn - when, in April?

DR. TAYLOR: Yes, early April.

MS. ROBERTSON: It is putting the cart before the horse. They made an assumption - it is dangerous, there are lots there, now we better go out and find them to substantiate our claims. And they haven't, they can't - they're trying desperately and they can't produce . . .

MS. COOK: Stephanie, we have native longhorn beetles, do we not, that are very similar to the brown spruce?

MS. ROBERTSON: Oh yes.

MS. COOK: How many species of longhorn beetles do we have in Nova Scotia, do you know?

MS. ROBERTSON: Well, in the park, 16, and I think outside, 21. You can't tell the difference in some of them. The size of the holes in the sap tubes, they're all similar sizes. You can't look at a tree and say that's a sap tube, oh, it's got the brown spruce longhorn beetle. You can't tell, it could be 35 others - well, no, 15 others, 20 others outside - are doing the same thing, producing the same size holes, the same sap tubes.

DR. TAYLOR: Another point to make on that is this question of the introduction. Unfortunately the press, goaded by CFIA, has treated this as if it has been this massive explosion of something that is rampaging over the forest. It is not, it never has been. It arrived a lot earlier than CFIA has said, and the probability is that it has been here for a very long period of time. When they were bringing in trees from Europe in the 19^th Century, there were no pest controls whatsoever and the probability is that it has been here for a very long period of time, it has been here long enough to adjust and to have its own predation and to have its own other insects which are going to control it.

So what we've got here, we had a discovery by a new federal agency with a lot of money and a lot of willingness to charge around and exert its authority, discovering

something over which it had that authority, and then using that. So that's politics, it's not science . . .

DR. DONALD GRADY: Will you permit me to speak, please?

DR. TAYLOR: Do you wish to address that?

DR. GRADY: Yes, I do. John, would you permit me to speak?

MR. CHAIRMAN: Oh, by all means.

DR. TAYLOR: Can I introduce Don Grady, if he hasn't already been introduced, who is also with the Lawrencetown/Cole Harbour group.

MR. CHAIRMAN: You need to come to a mic, Don.

DR. GRADY: Thank you very much. In Lawrencetown and Cole Harbour, those who speak on behalf of our community committee have really illustrated the core of the outcome of the problem created by the Government of Canada and the federal Food Inspection Agency. There were no specific references in the presentations made by the Ecology Action Centre and the Friends of Point Pleasant Park or by Carol O'Neil on behalf of our committee, but the fact of the matter is no one from the Government of Canada has ever come to this region, this province, and this policy, to examine whether or not it has a basis. Representatives of the three groups who have presented here today, on January 23^rd were invited to make a presentation to CFIA through its representatives in Nova Scotia, the Canadian Forestry Service in New Brunswick, and CFIA representation from Ottawa, but in that day, no one listened to us.

This is the first time that the citizens - it's not the first time that citizens in this terrible paradox have been able to speak to their political representatives, because members of your committee and of the Legislature have been in the community meetings in Lawrencetown and I know have been present when the Friends of Point Pleasant Park and the Ecology Action Centre have outlined the problem. It may appear amusing for us to say the emperor has no clothes, but it is far more fundamental than that. The question you've asked, Clarrie, I think is a question for which CFIA does not have an answer or an intention to provide an answer.

I've read the transcripts of committee meetings in March and in May and questions like the one you've just put, Clarrie, have been asked by different members of the committee, including the chairman, and those questions have not been answered. So it's vitally important for us, as citizens of Nova Scotia, not to provoke partisan disagreements about how to go ahead with a question of policy before the province and within the province's jurisdiction. The burden on us is to encourage you to work together, independent of Party distinctions and

legislative priorities, to provide an answer to the people who elected you and to make sure that the arrogant personages in Ottawa, who have taken their authority to an abuse in CFIA, actually participate with you in a solution that peremptorily includes the establishment of a scientific basis for the hysteria, foolishness and abuse of authority that the Government of Canada, in this case, has engaged in.

DR. TAYLOR: Don . . .

DR. GRADY: No, I know, I know . . .

DR. TAYLOR : We need to move on, I think . . .

DR. GRADY: No, we don't need to move, we need to listen for another moment, and I promise I'll finish very soon. I promise both of the chairpersons in the room and all of the members that I'll finish very soon.

In the treatment of the problem we now have before us, the Government of Canada is - as an American regular army general observed in connection with the catastrophe in Louisiana and the tropical destruction perpetrated by nature and ignored by government - at the moment the Government of Canada is stuck on stupid, and there's no justification for that. We've had support from our federal MPs - Peter Stoffer, Bill Casey, Michael Savage - they represent three constituencies in the federal government. I spoke yesterday to Peter and asked him if he has gotten a meeting with the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. Peter laughed and said to me, I've been talking to those dopes since 2003, no one is listening and no one is acting.

Everyone up here who has spoken thus far has spoken extremely politely. I think it's time for us to speak with painful directness, unless your committee does use the authority in the hands of the Legislature of Nova Scotia to move a principled application of the commissioner capacity, which is within the power of the Government of Nova Scotia, to make an answer to the question, does CFIA have any scientific basis? They refer to science, they commission studies, and they acknowledge and defer to the word "science", but do they have a peer-reviewed and reliable scientific demonstration that the brown spruce longhorn beetle is a menace to our forests and that they have the authority to continue to expand the quarantine zone until, as several of my colleagues have pointed out, there are no more zones left?

I leave aside the question of the Government of the United States. We know about what's going on there, and we know that they are not too friendly to the prospect of continuing the exemption that has been applied under the free trade agreement to the forest products of Nova Scotia. Please help us, and please understand that there is a reason for us to be angry, as well as requesting.

MR. MACKINNON: Mr. Chairman, I realize that we don't have the usual time for questioning and I do have to share with my colleagues - I have a whole series of questions here, and I hope I have an opportunity perhaps to speak again - but if you will allow me one more question before moving on . . .

MR. CHAIRMAN: I won't.

MR. MACKINNON: I should have asked it first, without the preamble.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Our time is running, and I want to address the requests of the three groups before we leave here, so I'd like to move along as quickly as possible in terms of the questions, and hope we'll have a few minutes to address requests by the group.

Mr. Preyra, I think you're on the list.

MR. LEONARD PREYRA: Well, if the other Parties have questions, I would defer, but I would like to, if there is another round, to come back, Mr. Chairman.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Then you may never get another question. (Laughter)

Mr. Gaudet.

MR. WAYNE GAUDET: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Again, I want to thank the presenters this morning, it is certainly interesting. I have a few questions. Dr. Taylor, you made an interesting comment when you said CFIA policies are not based on science. So I'm just curious what their policies are based on.

DR. TAYLOR: In this particular instance we're referring to their policies not being based on appropriate science. The particular issue that comes to mind is that they have failed to demonstrate that the BSLB is attacking healthy trees.

MR. GAUDET: Stephanie, you indicated in your presentation that the CFIA said there were no predators or parasites, yet you said the CFIA did a study on parasites.

DR. TAYLOR: Seven years later.

MS. ROBERTSON: That was later, a lot later they did that study. In the beginning they said there were none.

MR. GAUDET: You indicated that they wasted millions. Do we have any knowledge on how much was wasted and on what?

MS. ROBERTSON: Well, the whole program - bringing down people from Ottawa, special machinery, we saw lots of young people hired, with special uniforms, hanging around the park for years and they had to pay their salaries. Now in the media it was reported as $2 million, but we don't have any access to that.

DR. TAYLOR: We don't have any access to specific figures and perhaps your committee might, which we would be very interested in.

MR. GAUDET: I know, Mr. Chairman, you indicated that we will be looking at the request that has been proposed here this morning by the three different groups. I'm just wondering, has there been any formal request made to the federal government to federal ministers on behalf of your groups?

DR. TAYLOR: Yes, I sent them a letter, and a copy of the letter that went to Mr. Morse you see is copied to various other people down below, including Chuck Strahl.

[10:30 a.m.]

MR. GAUDET: But as far as requests directed specifically to the federal minister. I know a copy was forwarded to two federal ministers, but I'm just curious . . .

MR. IAIN TAYLOR: Part of the problem is that CFIA doesn't really talk to us. I mean, are they here today, to listen even? No. Have they ever asked us in these rounds of negotiations with interested stakeholders to attend? No. Have they ever referred to us in any of their official literature? No, because we have challenged their interpretation and, in fact, we've become invisible as a result.

MS. COOK: We requested, yes, we've sent letters to the federal government with copies to the Prime Minister and to various Ministers of Agriculture and Agri-Food, and the response has been we're sending this to another department, or essentially we've been stonewalled and told that this is the way it is and there will be no change - you are in the quarantine zone and it is what it is and we're not responding at all. So yes, we have done that.

MR. GAUDET: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Theriault.

MR. HAROLD THERIAULT: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, thank you panel. I've been sitting here listening and, being in the fishing industry all my life, it pretty near sounds like you're talking about the Department of Fisheries . . . (Laughter)

DR. TAYLOR: You can say that, I couldn't . . .

MR. THERIAULT: . . . because DFO works the same way as CFIA, I believe. They had lots of scientific advice over the years, but they used their science not to control the fishery but to control the industry and control the people. This sounds similar, it sounds like CFIA is using this bug to control the industry, control how much output can be in the industry, control the amount of people in it. That's the way I see that.

How you would ever fight that, I don't know. We've been fighting that with DFO for twenty years and still they have the control over that. Their thing was, for years and years, too many people chasing too few fish. So now I believe it is too many people chasing too few trees for the market size. So they'll use a bug or whatever they can come up with, if this little bug was a nice little thing, you know, to use - here we've got something we can quarantine, quarantine all Nova Scotia if we want to, shut her right down, we'll use one bug.

MS. ROBERTSON: I'm glad you said that because I've been thinking it for a long time.

MR. THERIAULT: It's the way I've seen it.

DR. TAYLOR: I'd like to respond, if I may and then I'll pass you over to Joanne because I'm sure she'll have a well-founded opinion on this. I speak as somebody who was in the federal government as a civil servant and somebody who was trying to do various kinds of science, but I also know a lot of people in government over the years who have been involved in science.

Science isn't just a thing, science doesn't just happen out of nowhere. Science is a human activity and while science attempts to be value-free and exact, scientists are financed, they have grants. Who creates those grants? They are created usually by public bodies that point them in certain directions. If the science hasn't been done, it's not because it's bad science, it's because there are holes that CFIA are responsible for. They're the ones that commission the science and I think they are on record as saying, we are not a science agency, we don't, in fact, have scientists work for us. What they do is they contract research by other people, and if there are gaps in the research that appear to us to occur, then they are responsible for those as managers of science, if not scientists themselves.

The fact that the science is not there - and you can take this for the fishing industry if you wish, I'm not an expert in that area - is usually because (a) they haven't asked the right questions or (b) the poor scientists know the answers that the politicians want to hear and maybe their livelihoods are on the line if they give the wrong answers. So you don't tend to get the independence, which is supposedly what is out there to guide policy making.

These people are there to provide people, who are non-experts, with the best information possible. You can't do that if they are hiding things or if they're not telling you things, or if they're not asking the right questions of their own scientists. You have to hold

their toes to the fire a bit on this, I think, and make sure that the people who are commissioning the science are commissioning the right science and asking the right questions, and getting some independence into it. Maybe that's a solution somewhere down the pike because it is a problem in government, how to get independent information, how to get independent advice from your own employees, if you want, or contractors.

Joanne, would you like to say something on that?

MS. COOK: Very briefly, because I know the clock is running. I'm going to be just entirely blunt here. I don't think that the imposition of the original quarantine and the brouhaha over cutting in Point Pleasant Park and all of that stuff that went on had anything to do with science - it had everything to do with politics and political economy. You have to remember that at the time when the BSLB issue first blew up, we were at the height of the softwood lumber dispute. Here in the Maritimes, we got off lightly all through that because we never had the punishing countervailing duties imposed, because so much of our lumber that was going to the United States was coming off private land. So our sawmills, in fact, did very well during the softwood lumber dispute because we had that advantage, we weren't paying the countervailing duties.

The Canadian Government was desperate to keep as much lumber flowing to the United States as possible and was terrified that the Americans would seize on any pretext to slam the door further shut on Canadian lumber. An alien beetle which might or might not be eating trees would be a perfect pretext for the Americans. I think a lot of this came about as the result of an attempt at demonstrating to the Americans that we were doing due diligence when this beetle was identified. It had nothing to do with what the beetle was actually doing - it had everything to do with not giving the Americans an excuse to put any further restrictions on the flow of lumber south. That is strictly my opinion, I have no facts to base it on, but I think it is a well-reasoned analysis.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. MacKinnon, I'll go back to you for questions.

MR. MACKINNON: Thank you. Don Grady said that people have been too polite for too long - I think that was the gist of what he was indicating. What I find most appalling about this whole situation is the fact that - and I'm being non-partisan here - the provincial government did step up to the plate in relationship to this problem. However what I find appalling and outrageous is that the federal government has not come into the picture. When people have gotten, in the quarantine area, $5 for chips, is unbelievable, that one company was recognized as being the company to be involved in a harvest. I would like to know what value would people have gotten out of those stands if in fact they were harvested properly, without this imposed plague? This is a government that has turned its back on a negotiated accord - and this imposed plague, they have done nothing dollar-wise to help the people in that area. Does anyone have an idea of the estimated losses, because they are so substantial, so significant.

MS. O'NEIL: Alfie Giles is a member of our community, may he speak?

MR. CHAIRMAN: Yes.

MR. ALFRED GILES: I've been following the industry since the longhorn beetle came into being, and from the experts in the field, we should be able to receive between $1,000 and $1,500 for a raw acre of land. That's not an unreasonable amount of money to get from just general - that's not extra timber or good timber, but across the board. An acre of land in the Province of Nova Scotia should yield you between $1,000 and $1,500 per acre, that's an average, and that's from experts in the field.

MR. BOB EISENER: I'm Bob Eisener and I own a small, 200-acre woodlot in West Lawrencetown. I just wanted to add one thing to Alfie's comments - when we started all of this he suggested that the CFIA or the government bring in a certified forestry technician to go visit the properties and let them evaluate what the properties were worth. I just wanted to add that one comment, that we did try.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Preyra.

MR. LEONARD PREYRA: Mr. Chairman, I really would like to thank the Friends of Point Pleasant Park, the Ecology Action Centre, and the Lawrencetown/Cole Harbour Citizens Action Committee for coming here today. It has been a real education, especially in Halifax Citadel. We seem to have a great number of scientists who have devoted an awful lot of attention to this issue, particularly, of course, Mr. Majka who has spoken with me on a number of occasions, both formally and informally, about the evidence and I find his argument pretty compelling.

As I understand it, of the three sets of issues that we're pursuing here today, one is the scientific evidence itself supporting the initial decision and the April 25^th revision of that decision, the fact that the evidence itself is either not there or hasn't been available in public. I'm wondering why that evidence is not available given that it is such an important piece of the puzzle. Also, the Minister of Natural Resources in his response said that the science committee has been reporting to the Brown Spruce Longhorn Beetle Task Force and he is convinced that that committee is functioning well. Do we have any data on what kind of evidence is being submitted by the science committee and whether or not that evidence is as solid as the minister claims it is, and should we ask for access to that information?

DR. TAYLOR: We, of course, have no access to information other than as members of the public. We're not a member of that committee, we do know some of the people who are on it, but we get to see it eventually, after it comes out. Some of it comes out with a very considerable amount of delay, some of it comes out in a form which is, I think - not to be too harsh - you'd have to describe it as in a non-scientific fashion in that they do not provide the kind of data that allows you to make comparable analyses.

Chris, would you mind just speaking briefly to that particular point, on data availability? Chris Majka has been introduced to you.

MR. CHRIS MAJKA: I'm Chris Majka with Friends of Point Pleasant Park. It is a good question, Leonard, about what information is available and not, and why isn't it available. In one of the graphs that Stephanie presented, as part of her presentation, there was a sort of bar of the different studies that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency had done. There are thirteen of those and we categorized them according to different groups, and you'll notice that there was a series on detecting the beetle and there was a series on fungal associates. In fact from our standpoint, the salient thing about that is, what is not there. The glaring omission really is the most important question that has to be answered, what the Friends of Point Pleasant Park have been maintaining for some time, which is: Does this beetle attack healthy trees and, in fact, is it any different than our native fauna here? That's really the salient question.

[10:45 a.m.]

If it is different, if it is the case, as I say, if I have argued that it attacks healthy trees, then we really have a problem here, and then we can discuss how big a problem and what kinds of measures should we take in order to combat that. If it is not attacking healthy trees and if it's not any different than, for example, those thirty-six different species that we've detected in Point Pleasant Park - coming back to Clarrie's original question - then we don't have a problem at all, then it's no different than many native insects that feed on dead and dying trees. And in fact when you look at the CFIA studies, with the exception of one which partially addresses that question, all of them have been regulation, detection and questions - you know, if you put the logs through a wood chipper, do you kill the beetles? Yes. Useful things to do, but if we don't worry about killing the beetles why are we doing these first.

The one preliminary study that the CFIA did, in the year 2000, on this in fact showed, as we suspected, that brown spruce longhorn beetles were attacking trees of low vigour preferentially, rather than healthy trees. It was a good study, it was truncated because the Canadian Food Inspection Agency cut all the trees in Point Pleasant Park, so they couldn't carry on. So in fact the heart of what we've been arguing is that the science that either establishes this as a pest and attacks healthy trees in a different way than native species or not needs to be done. Not only has it not been done, but seven years have passed and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency has not even embarked on doing such a study. So in the year 2000 we could have argued this point, and it was sort of moot - we thought not, they thought so, but seven years have passed and we haven't gotten any further. That is really at the heart of what our concern is, why has this amount of time passed and we're still not any further ahead?

DR. TAYLOR: Maybe you want to comment on the quality of the data they have released.

MR. MAJKA: Well the quality of the data is - they have done a number of different studies and only a small number of them, of those thirteen different studies I think only about four have actually been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, and some of them have been quite reasonable. Stephanie discussed this - a preliminary study they did on parasites in Point Pleasant Park, which again was terminated because the trees were cut there, and that was a valuable thing to know. It was very valuable because - and you may have already heard the CFIA discussing this question - the concern is sometimes that when insects or other organisms are brought into an environment where the natural regulatory mechanisms are absent, like predation and parasitism and competition, they can spring forth and become invasive, and that is a legitimate concern and that sometimes happens.

There was a concern that local predators and parasites were not affecting this beetle. Well, in fact, already in 2000 the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, in a study that paralleled our observations, showed that there were very high rates of all of the natural parasites that are present attacking this, as they were the native species of beetles here. But there has been the difficulty that much of the information has not been published - of these thirteen studies, nine of them or so have not been published at all.

It's been very difficult for us to get information - well, not just us, but anyone. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency habitually doesn't release information, even when it is requested or even when we've had to, in the past, pedal through Freedom of Information requests, and even though that information that does come out is fragmentary, it is incomplete, it sometimes makes it impossible to make bases of comparisons, and a really big problem from our standpoint has been the fact that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency has not collected the kind of information that could legitimately allow a basis of comparison.

For example, and I'll conclude with this, and it is a very simple illustration. The CFIA often releases information on the number of brown spruce longhorn beetles, it could be 10 or 100 or 300, or whatever, and you say okay, but what does that mean, really, because unless you also release information on all of the other insects that are there - for example, 300 brown spruce longhorn beetles sound like a lot, but if there are 10,000 other longhorn beetles being caught at the same time, well it doesn't really sound the same at all. That's really the essential point. If it is only 300 brown spruce longhorn beetles that were attacking these trees, that wouldn't be a problem, but if these 300 are part of 3,000 or 30,000, we'd look at it really differently. That information is not released, and it means that not only organizations like us but you, yourselves, can't really evaluate what does this information mean on that level.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Before I go to Mr. Preyra, I want to say, from I think it was CFIA's presentation, that Canada is a signatory to a treaty around invasive species. So when we talk about the politics of some of the actions that we've seen rather than science, it may well be attributed more to a treaty like that than it is to what we actually find in the beetle world.

Mr. Preyra.

MR. PREYRA: Yes, just a quick follow-up question on the question of an independent provincial commission. What all of the witnesses seem to be saying here is that Nova Scotia has a constitutional responsibility for conserving and protecting this resource, and that responsibility means that it should conduct an independent, scientific investigation of the evidence, in particular in the light of our seven-year experience with this, to look at the studies that have been conducted to date to look at what's not there, and also to look at what we now know based on that seven-year experience. Why hasn't the province, in your discussions with them, agreed to establish this provincial commission, given the fact that it makes so much sense?

DR. TAYLOR: I think the official position is summed up in the May 4^th letter from the Nova Scotia minister, Minister Morse. I wouldn't want to speak for him or his officials - presumably he sounded them out on this - but maybe I can comment that we are a small province and we don't have a lot of money, as I am sure everybody in this room knows, and when a senior level of government is out there with the kind of deep pockets that they appear to have had on this, the normal reaction might be to thank them very much and say, go to it, providing you're confident with what it is that you're doing.

I guess what we're here today to say is, hang on folks, maybe your confidence here has been misplaced. We really think there's a problem here, we think there's public money being spent on a non-issue and an insect that doesn't bear the kind of money and investment that has been put on it - and we won't get around it by us saying to CFIA, if they ever listened, you got it wrong, and them saying no, we didn't. You have to step back and look at what we've tried to find out - and you just heard from Chris about the frustrations of being able to even come up with independent scientific verification of what they're doing when they have a black box and they're producing certain things, but you never get to look inside it. We've not been allowed to look at the actual numbers from particular sites. Stephanie says if they're not collecting a broad range of other insects, then we don't know what this is a sample of, and so on. So there are so many of these unanswered questions that we really need to ask you to ask them to come up with it, and to do it in an independent fashion.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. MacKinnon.

MR. MACKINNON: Mr. Chairman, I would like to make a motion, if it is in order. I believe that our three rural economic sustainers, our fish, our forests, and agriculture, have to be supported. Here is a situation where we're being asked for an independent science review, and that can be a one-person commissioner, if need be, to look at this situation. If we cannot support one person, one scientist to look at this, there is something dramatically wrong with us, and I want to move that we support this request wholeheartedly. Thank you. So moved.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Well, okay, I want to know in what form. Are you saying - since we can't appoint a commissioner, but we can ask the minister to do so, that's what I'm thinking, there should be a letter from this committee to the minister with a request that he appoint an independent commissioner to review the science around the longhorn beetle in Nova Scotia. So am I close as far as . . .

DR. TAYLOR: Yes, I understood that you didn't have the authority and power to do that, but certainly to recommend. I'm sure the minister would take your recommendation very seriously and, for our part, we would do anything we could to provide that individual with whatever information we have available.

MR. MACKINNON: Personally, I don't care where this person comes from, whether it is provincial money or federal money, as long as it is totally independent. The federal government has done sweet nothing in relationship to looking at this problem with dollars, other than spending a lot of money in Point Pleasant Park, right?

MR. THERIAULT: I would just like to say one thing about this, about an independent study. Fifteen years ago, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans clumped all the fish together, on the Scotian Shelf. We, as long-time fishermen in the Bay of Fundy, argued against that, that the Bay of Fundy fish was an independent stock. Oh, no, it's not an independent stock, it's all one stock. They said prove it, you prove it and we'll look at it. So we did our independent study in the Bay of Fundy. It took about three years, a lot of fishermen involved, a lot of good scientists from the Gulf of Maine, and Maine, and New Brunswick - and Dave Clarke was one of them, a good scientist - we did the study, and somewhere that sits on the shelf at DFO with about an inch of dust on it.

So I'm just giving you forewarning about an independent study for a federal department of the CFIA, or whatever department it is. They said to us, you do the study and you prove it and we'll look at it. I don't know if it was ever looked at. They just went on their merry way with their ITQs and dividing up the fishery the way they felt best, and here we sit today. So I'm just giving you forewarning.

DR. TAYLOR: Well, that is a good forewarning. My comment only, on that, would be that maybe you have a little more power to your elbow here in this particular case, because the federal government does rely on the province to co-operate, particularly on the question of quarantine, and maybe there is a little bit more room to influence policy. I would hope so, anyway.

MR. GAUDET: Mr. Chairman, I'm just looking for clarification. Is the request directed to the provincial minister, or to the federal minister, or to both levels of government? I think part of the request here before the committee is that we should maybe include both levels of government in our request, because there is no doubt our provincial minister has to work in conjunction with his federal colleague.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Good point. Actually, I was curious about the same thing. I'm just not sure about the wording, whether we want to write our provincial minister with the request that in conjunction with the federal government that they establish the independent commissioner and review the science.

DR. TAYLOR: Mr. Chairman, excuse me for interrupting. I'm sure you're aware that the CFIA is an agency of the federal government, and is not a line department although it reports through the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food - has little less day-to-day control and jurisdiction when it comes to agencies, as we know with passports and other things.

MR. CHAIRMAN: I guess before I move to the committee to find out if they are fine, I want to know if you are fine with that - does that address your concern?

DR. TAYLOR: You mean the federal, provincial side of it?

DR. GRADY: It would if it's a provincial independent investigation. Sorry, Mr. Chairman, I certainly defer it to the judgment of my colleagues, but to get both levels of government supporting an independent review on the issue of science is extremely difficult, because if you ask both levels to do it you have to have agreement on both sides.

[11:00 a.m.]

To date, we in the community have never seen any willingness whatsoever on the part of the federal government to involve itself in this issue. I'm not to speak to motions made by members of the committee, but I understood Mr. MacKinnon's motion very clearly, and I believe his motion gets us started on the route that all of us want to follow.

MR. CHAIRMAN: You can speak, because I asked you for comment. My only point I would make is that if the provincial government is going to do the independent review, that it is unlikely they would do that without contacting the federal government. So if you're thinking the federal government won't want to do a joint one, then what makes you think they'll be friendly toward supplying information for a provincial one?

DR. GRADY: Again, with apologies, because I believe in the unutterable and irreducible power of the human heart, and I believe if the provincial government shows - sorry, Mr. MacKinnon - the lead on this issue - Mr Theriault - and undertakes to support this principle, it will be very difficult for anyone, not that they would, but it would be very difficult if there were federal political actors and bureaucratic actors to oppose them.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. MacKinnon.

MR. MACKINNON: Mr. Chairman, my motion is to call on the provincial minister to . . .

MR. CHAIRMAN: Of Natural Resources?

MR. MACKINNON: . . yes, to undertake a scientific inquiry by independent science sources. Having said that, if the minister wants to look for some money from Ottawa in relationship to that, all well and good. I believe that this committee, with the importance attached to this issue, should in fact call on the provincial minister to ensure that this is, in fact, done.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Gaudet.

MR. GAUDET: Mr. Chairman, I would be pleased to second that motion.

I think for our committee, in terms of should we be addressing ourselves to the provincial or federal or to both, maybe, as Clarrie indicated, let's go ahead and ask our provincial minister, and if it is not within his jurisdiction, I'm sure he'll gladly advise us and then we can move to the next stage. So I think at this stage I would be glad to support Clarrie's motion to proceed to write to our provincial Minister of Natural Resources for an independent scientific study.

MR. PATRICK DUNN: I also agree with Clarrie's opinion there, and as people are talking, I'm wondering where there is going to be the most impact with regard to where we go from this particular point, whether it be provincially, federally, or a combination of. I keep thinking that eventually it's going to have to be a combination of, but at least we can get the wheels in motion by contacting the provincial minister with regard to this.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Well, I don't want to say, because it is only opinion and I'm not sure what that's worth in the real world - my thought is that the review of science, I mean there is science out there that we don't have to go to the federal government to get. It would be nice if they would contribute whatever they've done, but I don't know if that would handcuff our commissioner, but let's ask the question of the minister first.

I'd like to move another motion, if I could.

MR. GAUDET: On that same one, or . . .

MR. CHAIRMAN: No, a different motion.

Would all those in favour of the motion please say Aye. Contrary minded, Nay.

Fine, thank you very much.

I would like to move a motion that we write the federal minister, Chuck Strahl, in regard to the issue of compensation and cleanup - these may be mutually exclusive in the

sense that if they would compensate you enough they may take that into consideration as the cleanup, or vice versa. I would like the letter to be written in terms of the question, as much as anything, around previous federal compensation in terms of BSE, avian flu, the Quebec ice storm, where the federal government has compensated farmers or landowners, and with other biological or natural disasters, I think to pose the question to seek parameters that could be used from those examples that would apply to the people in the Lawrencetown/Cole Harbour area of Nova Scotia. So, I want to see if the panel is fine with that.

Joanne.

MS. COOK: Definitely, John, I think that's a very good idea and something that really needs to be looked into. It has been screaming throughout this morning, I think, that people have incurred substantial losses as the result of BSLB first, and then Hurricane Juan on top of it, and the interaction between the two things.

I think one issue that does need to be raised in this context - and I don't know whether it would be appropriate to be in that letter to the Honourable Mr. Strahl or not - one issue that needs to be dealt with is the quality of advice that was given to landowners regarding post-Juan cleanup techniques. There was, legitimately, in the early days a great fear of fire, for example, and DNR advised a lot of clear-cutting as a cleanup technique.

We know there has been forestry science that has shown that, for example, the risk of fire drops off dramatically within about five to six years after a blowdown because of decomposition processes - the wood gets moist and saturated with water and the likelihood of fire drops off. Just looking at those couple of slides from Carol's land, those areas look scalped. I don't think it's any surprise to the people in this room that one of the few good things about the way we've been doing clear-cuts in the last fifteen or twenty years has been that we've been leaving a lot of coarse, woody debris and tops and small stuff on the ground and that helps retain and restore soil fertility.

What has been happening to the fertility of the soil within the Juan corridor, where the advice has been to do that kind of work, and how has that impacted on the value of people's land and people's property - so the whole issue of what post-Juan remediation was suggested, what was actually carried out, what have the actual impacts of that remediation been over and above the obvious costs, I think is an issue of both environmental and forestry science that needs to be looked into in that context.

MS. O'NEIL: And if I could, Mr. Chairman, just to say that the community members have been asking for good advice on how to overcome the difficulties that we are facing - our land has been scalped.

MR. CHAIRMAN: I was kind of thinking of a yes or no answer, but I guess my thought is that if the minister were to even slightly move that he was interested in going down that road, the issue you raised would be one that would be in the mix.

MS. COOK: I essentially wanted to get it on the record while we were here.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Good job. (Laughter)

I don't have a seconder for my motion. Is there any discussion on the motion?

Would all those in favour of the motion please say Aye. Contrary minded, Nay.

The motion is carried.

Thank you, committee. I think our business - well even for me showing up late, we caught that time back.

Any summary comments? We usually let our presenters wrap up - Mr. Taylor, if you have any comments you would like to make.

DR. TAYLOR: Just very briefly to thank the committee for its attention and for its conclusions. They are, I think, very appropriate, but when you go into something like this you never know whether that's going to be followed through. I think we are very grateful and we await the next step with great interest, and we will certainly co-operate in any way that we can in trying to further that.

MR. CHAIRMAN: I want to just qualify our committee in the sense that we don't really have the authority to make anybody do anything - if we did, you would probably notice more ruckus at committee meetings. But I don't want people to overestimate the powers of the committee, we really can only make requests to the government in the hopes that they will see it the same way that the committee has asked.

Thank you very much, we really appreciate your time and excellent presentations, we learned quite a bit.

MR. EISENER: Just one last thing. Thank you very much, and I wish this meeting could have taken place four years ago, we would be a lot further ahead by now - at least we are heading in the right direction.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you.

For members of the committee, we are going to give you a copy of the letter that was requested to go to the minister from our previous meeting on the fishery subcommittee

request. That has gone out, we haven't had a response, but I wanted you all to have a copy before you leave.

We are adjourned.

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