NRGO Committee Meeting

STANDING COMMITTEE ON NATURAL RESOURCES AND GOVERNMENT OPERATIONS

COMITÉ PERMANENT DES RESSOURCES NATURELLES ET DES OPÉRATIONS GOUVERNEMENTALES

EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Wednesday, February 23, 2000

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[English]

The Chair (Mr. Joseph Volpe (Eglinton—Lawrence, Lib.)): Gentlemen colleagues, I call the meeting to order pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), a study of Canadian forest management practices as an international trade issue.

Today we have with us a couple of ladies from the Sierra Club of Canada: Elizabeth May, the executive director; and Rita Morbia, the coordinator of the biodiversity programme.

I'm sure you've appeared before other committees. What we hope to do today is give you about 10 minutes of time, or maybe a little bit more if you require it. The reason we like to stay at about that 10 minutes is so that we can then engage in a dialogue, conversationally or very professionally, so that colleagues can get at some of the discussion that you want to generate. I hope that's okay with you.

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I want to remind my colleagues that the presentation, the written format, is available to them at the table. It's not being distributed because we didn't have a translated copy available, and as a practice, the committee doesn't distribute things that aren't bilingual. That having been said, a French-language copy will be available to members the moment it has been translated by our own staff. I acknowledged that this observation has been made by other members in the past, most recently yesterday by Monsieur St-Julien, so I'm going to ask Monsieur St-Julien and others not to make the same point again. It has been registered with the chair.

So without much further ado, Mesdames May and Morbia, who is going to speak first?

Madam May.

Ms. Elizabeth May (Executive Director, Sierra Club of Canada): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

[Translation]

I thank all members of the committee for giving me the opportunity to talk to them about Canada's forests. I strongly regret that our presentation is in English only. I hope it is possible to have it in French also. I make an effort. It is more difficult for a francophone to understand me, but I shall make an effort.

[English]

I will present briefly since you've given us the guidance of a 10-minute presentation. I think that's an excellent approach because it will leave us more time for questions.

We've organized our submission basically in response to your interim report, with some opening observations, which I will skip over, except to note that the Sierra Club of Canada has made a fairly substantial contribution to the knowledge base of other environmental groups, the Canadian public, and other policy-makers in pulling together a fairly complete portrait of the state of Canada's forests in the book At the Cutting Edge, which we note in the introduction, although I'm the author, was a project of researchers from coast to coast, including foresters, academics, retired members of the civil services and forestry departments across the country. We had peer reviewers and researchers from within the industry, including a logging contractor, as well as from biological sciences and those concerned with the non-timber values of forests.

I think we've pulled together a very complete picture. I would like to stress that we used government and industry data sources to put together an answer to the question, are we running the risk of our forests going the way of the cod? In other words, are we setting our annual harvest at levels that we can verify to be sustainable in the long term and in fact sustainable forever?

Our answer to that was disquieting in that we found that government sources and industry sources were reporting, fairly universally, timber shortages already, generally described as local but with disquieting trends in terms of the ever-expanding area that has been logged in Canada, the extent to which we are harvesting areas that have never been logged before and for which we then don't have a track record of second growth and our ability to sustain jobs in the industry.

The Sierra Club of Canada has perhaps taken a different view of this issue compared to other environmental groups because we believe it's essential for Canada that the forest industry be sustained. We're not looking just at the ecological issues, but also at the issues for small communities of sustainability and ensuring that forest management is sustainable in a biological as well as an economic sense.

So with that brief review of this book.... I was only able to bring three copies. I hope that will be enough to give to the committee for your resources. Obviously some of you may want to take it home and read it, and others may just want to leave it on a library shelf, but we'll be giving those to the committee staff.

The Chair: Madame, don't be shy. If you've already said there are limited editions, the chair will take care of it, and whatever economic consequences flow from rarity, the chair will be glad to reap them.

Ms. Elizabeth May: Okay, with that guidance, I will leave these with the chair.

I would like to respond very quickly to the two major points from your recommendations in the interim report.

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First, I think the committee is to be commended for looking at the issues more broadly than focused solely on British Columbia, as important as those issues are.

The Sierra Club of Canada has been very engaged in issues of certification, and we are also concerned about what may appear to be competing processes between the Canadian Standards Association and the Forest Stewardship Council. However, we see these two approaches as more apples and oranges, and we're concerned that a recommendation that they be integrated or harmonized may just not be possible or even necessary.

What we'd like to suggest is that in focusing on the issue of certification, we look at the importance of better communicating what these two certification systems represent. In other words, if you see a company that has been certified by the Canadian Standards Association or has an ISO certification, that signifies not a performance-based certification but a systems-based one, one that says this company is committed to ongoing improvements. It's a systems management certification and doesn't really say anything about the product at the end of the chain of custody that the ultimate consumer takes away.

The Forest Stewardship Council is designed to do quite a different thing and actually ascertain whether the logging on the ground meets environmentally appropriate standards, and then whether you can track the chain of custody of that product to the point of its ultimate sale. It actually certifies and stamps the consumer product with a logo to give the consumer some confidence that their purchasing power is going to improve forest management practices and support a particular woodlot that has been assessed to be of sufficient standards to be Forest Stewardship Council certified.

In my view, the two certification systems are not at all mutually exclusive. A company could carry both certification regimes, and a CSA certification would tell someone something different about a company than would a FSC certification. When you're familiar with both systems, you could see more certifiers having the ability to carry a CSA certification forward, as well as a FSC certification, but they're going to be measuring different things and looking for different things, and that makes it hard to say let's try to fit this into one package.

Another reason for being careful about trying to force a marriage here, if you will, is that the FSC logo has an internationally recognized identity, whereas CSA, through its association with ISO, has some, but speaks more to a domestic audience about a specific systems management commitment.

That's probably enough about certification.

More importantly, the role of the federal government is something that I really want to address. I also happen to serve on Minister Goodale's committee, the National Advisory Board on Forest Research. I'm the only one on that committee who is from an environmental group. The president of Weyerhaeuser—or he was the president—George Weyerhaeuser, chairs the committee, and the executive director of the Canadian Pulp and Paper Association serves on that committee.

The Chair: Is that a non-partisan committee?

Ms. Elizabeth May: Yes, it's a multi-stakeholder body to advise the Minister of Natural Resources on the problems around forest research.

The Chair: It's not to advise Mr. Goodale, but to advise the minister.

Ms. Elizabeth May: That's right. It happens that we were appointed by Mr. Goodale, and he has reappointed us. But the point is taken; it's in service to the minister and his or her department, as the case might be.

The Chair: Thank you.

Ms. Elizabeth May: We've been very concerned about the state of the budget of the Canadian Forest Service and its capacity to do forest research. Your interim report notes, going back to 1992 at the Earth Summit, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, Canada was very much seen to be in the lead. We were seen to be in the lead in a number of areas. If we're still perceived to be in the lead, it's only because the reality hasn't caught up with our reputation yet.

But I included in this brief the budget statistics from the main estimates, that in 1992 the Canadian Forest Service was actually a stand-alone federal department. It was the Department of Forests, and it had a budget of $246 million. That isn't really very large for a separate stand-alone federal government department, but shortly after Rio, during the summer of 1993, under Prime Minister Kim Campbell, the forest department was dissolved and thrown in with what had been the Department of Energy, Mines and Resources, and that was when Natural Resources Canada emerged as a federal government department.

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NRCan has not been as successful a home for the forest service as one would expect. Its budget fell when it was no longer its own federal government department. The precipitous decline in resources is really quite striking. This fiscal year, in the main estimates for 1999-2000, the budget of the Canadian Forest Service is $99.2 million.

This is a forest service that did actual primary science. The forest service ran a number of research stations across Canada, including the Laurentian Forestry Centre. A number of them have been closed since. It did routine work in assembling data that was of benefit to the provinces.

The question can quite rightly be asked: Why a federal department of forests at all? Why any federal forest service? This is one of the few areas of environmental concern where the Constitution speaks clearly and says forests are a matter for provinces.

The role the federal government has served has been far more than the role that some praise in propaganda and promoting Canadian forest industry interests abroad. Its historic role has been in science, in providing good data, and in helping provincial departments of forests make decisions based on scientific research and assembly of data and surveys that were done by the Forest Service.

The Canadian Forest Service maintained an insect and disease survey, as an example. That's one of the things it no longer does because of budget cuts. It did some things that we didn't particularly support at the time. There were massive subsidies to things that were environmentally inappropriate, in our view, through the FRDA program.

Overall it's really very sad, when you consider the importance of the forest industry in Canada, that the Canadian Forest Service's entire budget is less than the direct subsidy to the crown corporation Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, which is within the same department. It hasn't done well competing for resources within NRCan, and I think that's unfortunate. The prior reports from the National Advisory Board on Forest Research to the Minister of Natural Resources on this point have made the point that we need to continue to support basic, primary forest science and research, as conducted by the Canadian Forest Service.

What we're doing at the moment is very risky. We're doing a lot at the federal level through our missions and embassies abroad that really is in the nature of propaganda. At some point this can catch up with us. If we're not actually monitoring on the ground, if we don't have the data to back up our claims, we won't be able to continue to sell Canadian forest products overseas.

Believe it or not, colleagues of mine in the Canadian Pulp and Paper Association have worked with environmental groups in promoting endangered species legislation that will work. They make the point quite often that they are concerned that Canada should have good endangered species legislation. If we don't, they know they'll feel it in foreign markets, where foreign audiences want to know what Canada does about endangered species. So it's not just an environmental group complaint here. I think this is one that's fairly widely felt for those concerned about forest issues.

I want to move on very quickly to issues that you haven't, as far as I know, had a chance to take up yet.

The number one threat to Canada's forests right now, in the year 2000, is climate change. I've circulated this fact sheet along with our brief, just because it has a map that I'd ask you to look at. It's the chart that's on page 3. The source is Environment Canada. What it shows you is what kinds of climatic changes would be appropriate for what kinds of forests if the atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide were to reach a doubling point. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has anticipated that at current levels of carbon emissions and the rate at which they're increasing, we could see a doubling as early as the year 2030.

Obviously our forests won't suddenly shift from boreal to grassland; it won't happen overnight. As you can see, the present-day boreal forests of Canada stretch right across the country, but climatically appropriate terrain for boreal forests in a doubled CO₂ world shrinks pretty much to northern Quebec and Labrador and a small bit in the Northwest Territories or the Yukon. B.C. is not included only because they didn't have data for B.C. That's why it appears black.

Climatic change is a very significant threat to Canada's forests. As the forests represent an enormously important piece of the climate change puzzle, they are very important. Boreal forests globally hold 65 million tonnes of carbon in trunks, branches, and leaves, and a further 270 billion tonnes of carbon in soil and decaying matter.

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In other words, in balancing global carbon, while humankind is busy emitting more and more through the burning of fossil fuels, our forests are essential in holding that carbon out of the atmosphere and hopefully playing a role in delaying, postponing, and balancing global carbon budgets. Unfortunately, at this point, because forest fires and insects will increase in a climate change scenario, Canada's forests have already shifted from being a net sink for carbon—sink being the term for holding it out of the atmosphere and sequestering it in soils or in the roots and trunks and leaves—to a net source of carbon. Large forest fires create emissions of carbon as the forest burns.

There are a number of statistics in the paper I'm presenting to you in our brief testimony, but I'm going to skip over a lot of the statistics and go to the last point.

It may surprise you that an environmental group is concerned about this, but frankly, I don't think forest companies make enough money. I can't understand it. I talk to a lot of people in the forest industry and I know they say an investor doesn't want to sink their money into a forest company because the return on investment simply isn't there. With the economic signals and the tax system, instead of focusing on this kind of on-the-ground fight between environmental groups and forest companies, I think it would be of great benefit to a Canadian understanding of this issue if we looked at the fiscal system and if we looked at other ways in which we could adjust the economic system so that forest companies are less constrained.

Payroll taxes are a constraint. Because payroll taxes are there and the cost of labour is high, forest companies make an attempt to reduce that and to improve the efficiency of each individual employee. The result of that is ecological damage because machines do more damage than trained woods workers. Because machines are expensive, they can and must cut expanding areas all the time. Our interest is in seeing more forest workers and fundamentally....

I'm making this a very short presentation over a much longer and more detailed level of argumentation that should go into saying something like this. Canada's forest products industry right now is very much a quantity-driven industry. For the most part we are producing bulk raw product for export. There's not a lot of secondary processing. This makes our forest industry much more vulnerable to the global cycles of gluts on the pulp market.

We've certainly seen it. It's a very cyclical industry. The more we diversified our forest products, the more we had value added, the more we replicated the kinds of exports that one sees from Scandinavia, where we have a complete reverse. Roughly four-fifths of everything we're exporting is essentially raw product, whether it's pulp that is taken somewhere else to be made into magazine-quality paper, whether it's logs, whether it's timbers that will get further refinement elsewhere. We export a tremendous amount that is still at the lower end of production.

Less finished product and more raw product leaves us more vulnerable to global cycles. It leaves us more vulnerable to economic pressures and competition from others who are exporting raw products with less labour attached and less value added.

To shift to a quality-driven industry, I think we need to assess the tax system and send out those signals that help a forest company make more money at what they're doing. Look at their income tax levels, look at their payroll tax levels. This all generally falls into a category called ecological tax reform. If our society wants income and corporate profits, why do we tax those? If our society doesn't want pollution and environmental despoliation, why do we not tax those? It's called shifting our taxes from the good to the bad and hoping that those economic signals that are sent out assist not just the forest industry but other sectors in realigning the way they do business.

Companies will do the things that make economic, rational sense. Right now all the signals we've sent out say it makes more sense to lay off workers and buy machines, because fuel is cheap, relatively speaking, and workers are expensive. If we shift that balance, that's one of the more fundamental ways we could restructure the industry and keep more people employed while putting less serious pressure on the ecosystems that we are very fortunate, as a nation, to have within our borders. So realigning these factors is something I'd like to ask you to consider.

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My last point is a recommendation for the committee's consideration for your future work. You mentioned at the beginning, Mr. Chairman, that this isn't the first time we've appeared before a parliamentary committee. This isn't even the first time we've appeared before a parliamentary committee, even this committee, looking at forest issues, or the Senate committee that looked at boreal forest issues.

The most recent report of the Senate committee that looked at boreal forest issues has already had a significant impact on thinking within the Canadian Forest Service. But it strikes me as a potential opportunity that shouldn't be overlooked that perhaps this committee could engage the environment committee of the House of Commons, which has looked at issues of clear-cutting, as well as the Senate committee and see if there isn't a shared consensus view of what are the major challenges for the sustainability of Canada's forests and Canada's forest industry.

As suggested in the brief, it's confusing for the public when one committee goes through a set of hearings on forest issues and comes up sounding like an environmental group, and another committee goes through a series of hearings and comes up sounding like an industry group. And it doesn't really tell the public what parliamentarians have concluded about this. It tells them more who they've listened to.

I really believe in the parliamentary system. I believe in the democracy that can occur in all-party committees such as this. And they're all made up of people who put their life into public service and don't particularly represent one interest over another. And it would be innovative—I don't know that it's been done—to have a joint House of Commons-Senate report that involved the various House of Commons committees that have shown an interest in forest issues as well as the Senate committee that looked at boreal forest issues. I think this could be extremely valuable. And I think any recommendations that came out of such a mixed committee effort would be a real benefit and also an impressive exercise in democracy within the House of Commons.

Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you very much for that last comment as well. It comes on the political science side. I feel I often reflect on the fact that all standing committees have difficulty enough getting all of the disparate partisan views in one agenda. But at any rate, you've raised some very interesting points.

I want to go immediately to some of the members around the table. Maybe we can flesh them out a little bit more.

Mr. Stinson.

Mr. Darrel Stinson (Okanagan—Shuswap, Ref.): Are you connected with Greenpeace? Or do your sympathies lie with Greenpeace?

Ms. Elizabeth May: We sometimes work with Greenpeace on specific campaigns, but we're not in any way linked to them organizationally.

Mr. Darrel Stinson: Were you linked to them in regard to the Great Bear Rain Forest project that went on there?

Ms. Elizabeth May: We worked on Great Bear Rain Forest issues and have been actively involved in negotiating groups within the provincial government. And our chapter in British Columbia works with all the groups there engaged in Great Bear Rain Forest work. But I think, to guess at where you may be going with this, I could perhaps clarify that Sierra Club has never at any times supported boycotts of Canadian forest products overseas.

Mr. Darrel Stinson: But you are acting politically, in one sense, on behalf of Greenpeace?

Ms. Elizabeth May: We're not ever acting on behalf of Greenpeace. We act in the interest of our members and their concern for forest issues. And from time to time we have engaged with the Canadian Wildlife Federation or the Canadian Nature Federation, or World Wildlife Fund, or Greenpeace, on different issues. But we're not closely allied with Greenpeace.

I'm not disavowing Greenpeace, it's just that this is a very sensitive issue for our members in British Columbia. Our members live in communities—

Mr. Darrel Stinson: It's a sensitive issue for me too.

Ms. Elizabeth May: Yes. Our members live in communities where the forest industry is very important. And we have taken a very different approach from the Greenpeace approach in terms of urging boycotts.

Mr. Darrel Stinson: I happened to go up into the Great Bear Rain Forest, as it's so called. I talked to the natives up there, and actually they were quite upset with the loss of jobs that has taken place in that area. So I want you to be well aware of that.

I would also like to know what type of funding you get from the government, and do you have charitable status?

Ms. Elizabeth May: We do not have charitable status. We don't receive funding from government other than the occasional, which we are grateful for, contract to do particular work—like a public service announcement, for instance—but which overall comes to less than 10% of our overall budget. And also to clarify the charitable status question, there is also a separate organizations, the Sierra Club of Canada Foundation, which does have charitable status.

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Mr. Darrel Stinson: Are they related?

Ms. Elizabeth May: Yes, they are a related organization, but they're at arm's length. They have a different board. I don't work for them. And any funds we receive from the Sierra Club of Canada Foundation are limited to those activities as defined by Revenue Canada as charitable. So we do have donors who make a point of giving money directly to Sierra Club of Canada without a tax receipt because they want us to use those funds for more advocacy-oriented work.

Mr. Darrel Stinson: In your brief you note that research published in Science concluded that a logging replacement area does not approach old-growth storage capacity for at least 200 years.

Ms. Elizabeth May: That's right.

Mr. Darrel Stinson: I've talked to foresters, and they would strongly disagree with what you're saying there.

Ms. Elizabeth May: I'm citing a research article that was based on actual scientific investigation.

Mr. Darrel Stinson: By who?

Ms. Elizabeth May: I'm remembering the authors' names at the moment. It was published by M. Harmon and there were also a number of other researchers working with him—it's footnote 9.

The point here is that a young forest, a fast-growing forest, has a higher uptake of carbon. The rate at which it absorbs carbon is faster than that in an older forest. However, it doesn't approach the rate of storage capacity for carbon of an old-growth forest until it reaches 200 years old, and given quick rotations of 40, 50, and 60 years for logging, it would essentially mean that if you were looking at the standard industrial pattern of rotation-managed forestry you wouldn't see that level of carbon sequestration ever achieved because the forest would be cut before it could possibly reach the level at which it was sequestering the carbon.

So it's a question that, yes, the rate of carbon uptake is faster in a young poplar-aspen forest that's a plantation; it will take up carbon faster, but it does not in any way begin to replace the storage capacity of what has already been absorbed in old growth forests and also in the soils of old-growth forests. Remember, the volume stored in the soils of an old-growth boreal forest exceeds what's in the branches and the limbs, and leaves and the trunks, and if you log it, you lose the soil's CO₂ sequestration from disturbance and exposure.

Mr. Darrel Stinson: You'll find that you'll have scientists on both sides of that argument.

Ms. Elizabeth May: I don't think so, actually, sir. I think the differentiation between uptake rates and storage is where they all understand the issue to be.

Mr. Darrel Stinson: I noticed in here you talk about the forest industry not being able to make money due to taxation and that. I want to commend you on that. We've been saying that for a long time.

I have some concerns, though. In British Columbia we have a very stringent forest practices code, probably the most stringent in the world. Yet you want to take on the practices code out there, or say in British Columbia. What about the rest of the world?

Ms. Elizabeth May: Let me just clarify one thing about that taxation issue. It's not really taxation. One thing I think is really offensive about the current global economic structure is that money makes money faster than people can make money, and investors do better putting money into things like foreign currency speculation than investing in something with real value, creating jobs on the ground, and I think that policy-makers and politicians should look at this very seriously.

Another aspect of this—it may seem far-flung—is that looking at the Tobin tax to deal with this global casino I think is an important measure, because as long as people prefer to put their money at rates of investment and rates of return that are essentially basically gambling, they're not producing real jobs; it undermines the ability of real productive work to take place. And when real productive work and paying people to do it is not lucrative and not competitive, and somebody's sitting on billions of dollars, which people are these days—not any of us, but there are people who do that—and their better bet than investing in something productive that helps local communities is to put it in an international currency speculation market, it undermines our forest industry too.

So it's economic signals even more broadly than our tax system, but I do agree that the tax system, particularly around payroll taxes, should be re-examined.

There's no question that the forest practices code in British Columbia is about the best forest practices document and guidance that exists in any province of Canada or maybe anywhere else in the world. It has been eroded. It has been relaxed. We're very concerned about that. But what ends up happening is again, because a company is only marginally profitable, they have to struggle to cut costs where they can.

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If I can use an analogy, in a competitive airline industry, if you're a cut-rate airline you skip things you can afford to skip, you start handing out pretzels instead of a nice lunch, and then you stop skimping on maintenance, because those things that you have to pay for you have to pay for. It would be better in the long term for the environment, for Canada, for our economy, and for jobs, to make sure we took care of those things that currently aren't counted and currently aren't measured, like salmon habitat, like the ability of a forest to restore itself, like local jobs, like local communities.

Realigning those economic signals is a long-term process, but it's really important to do, and when companies are trying to cut corners, unfortunately they're cutting corners and fighting what they see is the red tape of the forest practices code. It is also true, I must say, that the forest practices code, while a very impressive approach to forest management compared to almost anywhere else, you're quite right, is cumbersome and doesn't allow operators on the ground the flexibility to say “I know what I'm doing.” The reason it's codified with so many rules is that we have a history of forest companies and of forest regulators in provincial governments turning a blind eye to routine destruction of other elements of the environment, which also bring economic returns to communities, particularly salmon habitat. That's the strongest example of where we've seen the loss of one economic opportunity, and completely unnecessarily. Logging could have taken place and maintained the forest that maintained that salmon run.

Mr. Darrel Stinson: I think there's a little bit more than logging involved in that.

The Chair: Mr. Stinson, I allowed the question to go on a little bit longer than I might normally.

Ms. May, don't give away those rare articles just yet.

Ms. Elizabeth May: I know, they're for you.

The Chair: If you leave things out there for members of Parliament, they're going to take them. C'est un cadeau.

Mr. Reed.

Mr. Darrel Stinson: Can I ask another question?

The Chair: No.

Mr. Reed, go ahead.

Mr. Julian Reed (Halton, Lib.): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I have two questions. One, Ms. May, you referred to government propaganda in foreign countries. Would you comment on NGO propaganda in foreign countries?

Ms. Elizabeth May: There are competing propaganda wars, and I think that it's not credible if all the federal government is doing is issuing basically media statements and glossy brochures to confront Greenpeace globally, if we're ignoring our own forest research at home. That's all.

Mr. Julian Reed: If people send funds to Greenpeace to buy a full-page ad in Der Stern and put a picture of a clear-cut in it in order to collect money, somebody's got to counter with the other side of the story.

Ms. Elizabeth May: I know the federal government sees that as being its role. I think that if it's going to do that, it has to make sure the claims that it's making are verifiable, and at this point it's simply not verifiable to say that Canadian forest operations are sustainable.

Mr. Julian Reed: Is it verifiable to say that clear-cuts are all horrible?

Ms. Elizabeth May: No, and I think you're really just dying to have someone here from Greenpeace.

Mr. Julian Reed: Actually, no, because I know exactly where they're coming from. But I point out that there has to be some balance in this situation, and for government to simply allow a money-making organization to raise its funds offshore by firing propaganda into those countries, in my view, has to be countered.

Ms. Elizabeth May: My point was, really, that there is a role for the federal government, and I think this role has historically been in fact-finding, research, and monitoring, and that those functions shouldn't be sacrificed with the body that actually does the science while the trade missions and embassies take over a propaganda role. At some point we just won't be able to fool a foreign audience if we don't actually know what's going on in our forests because we've cut the legs off the science.

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Mr. Julian Reed: So it's okay to let Greenpeace carry on, and we just sit quietly by and watch them rake in the bucks.

Ms. Elizabeth May: As I said, I would not suggest that the Government of Canada isn't going to go forward and defend Canadian industries overseas. I think we always do that. I'm not saying that we have to stop that. But it's a bit hypocritical if the only federal government role shifts away from doing the science and assembling the data, and knowing that the claims we're making overseas are verifiable, if we're only doing a propaganda role. As uncomfortable as a propaganda role sometimes makes me, I'm not recommending that Canada and our embassies not take that forward. They're always going to do that.

Dr. Yvan Hardy of the Canadian Forest Service appeared before you, and it's probably politically incorrect for him to point out to you that his budget is now 40% of what it was less than 10 years ago. Now, if you're serious about doing something, why would you ask someone to try to do it with 40% of the budget he had less than 10 years ago?

Mr. Julian Reed: I have one other question, Mr. Chairman.

The Chair: Sorry, Mr. Reed. You're probably hearing a bell. We're just checking to see whether it's a 15-minute or a 30-minute bell. I'll advise you as to what happens. Just carry on.

Mr. Julian Reed: You mentioned that climate change is the biggest threat to forests at the moment. The bulk of its base is through fossil combustion. Will the Sierra Club endorse hydro power now?

Ms. Elizabeth May: We've always supported small-scale, run-of-the-river hydro. We don't need to support mega centres.

Mr. Julian Reed: How about big scale?

Ms. Elizabeth May: We don't need to. The energy systems of the future are going to be more decentralized and more locally based. There is less risk of catastrophic events such as ice storms when you have more local, decentralized, renewable power sources and more energy efficiency. There's this awful...is it Hobb's choice?

Mr. Julian Reed: It's Hobson's choice.

Ms. Elizabeth May: Yes. You say, will you take nuclear now? No. Will you take large-scale hydro? No. Will you take coal? No. We don't have to. There are other energy sources and Canadian technology.

One of the areas of real foresight of this government has been to support Ballard. I think Ballard fuel cells are going to be used not just for running little cars around. They've now been sold in a different configuration to Japan to produce local, decentralized power for buildings. That's in Japan, not here.

Mr. Julian Reed: Okay. I have one final question. How would you like to invest in a low-return, real wealth producer that does not pollute?

Ms. Elizabeth May: I'd love to.

Mr. Julian Reed: I have a bridge for you.

Ms. Elizabeth May: I also don't have any money.

Mr. Julian Reed: I need $400,000.

Ms. Elizabeth May: Oh, okay. Well, we'll talk later.

Mr. Julian Reed: Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Reed.

We're going to go to Mr. Gruending. We have another 27 minutes, so we'll go for another 20 minutes. Go ahead.

Mr. Dennis Gruending (Saskatoon—Rosetown—Biggar, NDP): Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Welcome, Ms. May and Ms. Morbia.

It's about a year ago now that the committee began working toward the interim report we see here. You may know of many things that have happened in the interim. But I'd like to ask a brief question, which either of you may answer: how would you judge the efforts made by the forest industry in the last year? Has anything changed significantly?

Ms. Elizabeth May: In the last 30 years during which I've been working on forest issues in Canada, I've seen a substantial evolution of industry consciousness around issues of biological diversity. There are clearly industry leaders who are trying to get things right. I'm just trying to think about the last year. I think the most striking thing in the last year has been industry willingness to work with groups such as the Sierra Club in developing endangered species legislation that can be effective and to go to bat with us for habitat protection and say that they can make that work and still do logging. A year is not a really long time in forest industry terms.

Do you want to add something, Rita?

Ms. Rita Morbia (Biodiversity Campaign Coordinator, Sierra Club of Canada): I was just going to say that I think definitely there has been a recognition that biodiversity concerns with regard to forest-related activities and forestry are important. I don't think that concern was present 30 years ago, as Elizabeth was saying. I couldn't tell you about the last year, but recently there definitely has been a concern within the industry.

Ms. Elizabeth May: Some industry leaders aren't as progressive, which is why we're still so active. We also think that overall the rate of cut is too high. So even where individual companies are improving how they do logging, as long as the volumes exceed the ability of the forest to replace itself, then we're still in trouble.

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But there's no question that we've seen not just window dressing but some real efforts to improve forest management.

Mr. Dennis Gruending: I notice you mentioned that sometimes committees of the government look like environmental groups and other times they look like industry lobbies. I'm curious to know which is which here.

Ms. Elizabeth May: It's really kind of embarrassing. I sometimes debate Patrick Moore, who represents the Forest Alliance of B.C. He always likes to say that the House of Commons of Canada has supported clear-cutting, and I have to say to him, no, they haven't. There was no vote in the House of Commons. The House of Commons Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development has said that they're concerned clear-cutting isn't environmentally appropriate. They've held hearings and toured British Columbia. That committee is chaired by Charles Caccia. The predecessor of this committee some years ago, when it was chaired by Robert Nault, did another committee report that was in muted language. I didn't think it was a particularly strong endorsement of clear-cutting, but it said that clear-cutting is an appropriate silviculture tool. So a public can be confused.

Here you have the environment committee, which tends to use what sounds like more of an environmental approach to the issue, and the committee on natural resources, which industry claims supports clear-cutting. Then in the middle you have the Senate committee on boreal forests making some very innovative recommendations about the way the forest industry might consider large protected areas in the boreal.

Therefore, the public can end up saying the House of Commons hasn't really agreed on anything, have they? But the makeup of each of these committees is multiparty—

Mr. Dennis Gruending: You mentioned the Senate committee—

The Chair: Just a second. I know you raised this issue before, and I'm glad he's pursuing the question. The House of Commons can only respond if there's a motion on the floor, and there isn't one. But committees serve their purpose, and their purpose is to ensure that the issues come forward so that Parliament, either through its own initiative or through government, expresses itself through either a motion or a bill. It's accurate to say that maybe the House of Commons has not expressed itself, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the House of Commons must become the sole committee that hears everything.

Now, if you want to put the Senate committee, this committee, and other committees all under one umbrella and have a committee of the whole for every discussion, that's a governance model that might work in some cases. We have a different one. That's why Mr. Gruending is going to pursue the question.

Mr. Dennis Gruending: I have a final brief question, Mr. Chair.

Speaking of the Senate committee, as you have, Ms. May, there was a rather extensive report on the management of the boreal forest, and one of the key recommendations was something called the 20-60-20 formula. You'll know more about it than I do, and I won't describe it here. What do you think about that proposal, where a certain amount of the forest is set aside for parks, a certain amount is harvested in a certain way, and a certain amount is harvested in another way?

Ms. Elizabeth May: One of the things that happened from that Senate committee recommendation is that within the Canadian Forest Service they began to look at a quite dramatic shift, at least as a hypothetical, of their 2020 proposal. By the year 2020 we might have 80% of our logging taking place in plantation or second growth and set aside 80% of primary forest not just for a protected area, because you could fill that with lots of other activities, such as trapping and hunting, but so that you wouldn't end up having it.... At the moment, all the forests in Canada are essentially slated to be logged, so this would reverse that. The fact that the Senate committee had that kind of effect in that these are even being considered is very interesting.

We would like to see anything that would reduce the ongoing stress of logging pressure, particularly clear-cut logging, in primary and old-growth forests.

We think the Senate recommendations are very interesting. They're not entirely what we think would be a package that represents a solution, but they were certainly more innovative and more concerned with the biological diversity and sustainability of our forests than we've seen in almost any other report. So we were very supportive overall. They also made some very strong comments about the need to protect endangered species and species at risk and to protect their habitat within a boreal forest. I think the Senate report is really worth chewing over, and to the extent that you're broadening it to British Columbia, I'm sure you will be having a look at that committee report.

Ms. Rita Morbia: That proposal is an interesting starting point for discussion, but I think more analysis needs to be done on it. It's a fairly new proposal, so what exactly will it look like on the ground? Before we go further in terms of what happens on the ground and land management on a large scale, we'd need to look at the details. But it's an interesting starting point for discussion, definitely.

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Mr. Dennis Gruending: Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Ms. Elizabeth May: Mr. Chairman, may I prevail upon you for a moment to respond to your earlier point about the committee process, just quickly?

The Chair: Usually the chair doesn't like to be questioned.

Voices: Oh, oh!

An hon. member: That's because he doesn't know the answers.

The Chair: He never knows the answers. He just makes statements.

Voices: Oh, oh!

Ms. Elizabeth May: I just wanted to make sure I wasn't being misunderstood.

I know it would be unworkable to have all the committees work as a committee of the whole, and I'm not suggesting the House of Commons should unanimously endorse every committee report. I think the committees do a fabulous job, and it's a shame that committee processes aren't seen more by the public, instead of Question Period. I think people get a very skewed idea of what goes on in Ottawa, that everybody is always yelling.

I really do believe, though, that on the question of forest issues, because the debate tends to get polarized on the ground and because you have the Patrick Moores and the Greenpeaces out there, it would be awfully nice if an attempt were made with the committees that have actually dug into the forest issue to see if there were common ground within the House of Commons and Senate prophecies. That's all. It's something that's occurred to me, and it may not be workable, but I just suggest it to you in this one instance.

The Chair: Well, you prevailed upon the chair to listen, so the chair will pronounce himself further.

You should take some comfort in the knowledge that what happens with these committees is that all the members you see around the table, because they belong to different caucuses, take this perspective to their caucus. Their caucus is the one that really determines what the position will be from a partisan perspective, and that's the one that surfaces eventually in the House, whether it's on the government side or not.

At any rate, as I said, it's a question of a governance model. But I hope you take some comfort in the knowledge or in the information that what happens from this is really, really positive. It's not that those reports go off for academic study. There's a lot of anguish when these things get to a caucus.

Speaking of anguish, Mr. Schmidt.

Mr. Werner Schmidt (Kelowna, Ref.): I suppose I'd be the one considered dumped on with anguish.

The Chair: Well, you know, just partisanship.

An hon. member: You look anguished.

Mr. Werner Schmidt: Anguished? No, no.

I want to compliment you, actually, for the presentation you made. Unfortunately I was unable to hear the first part of it. I did read your brief and was rather impressed with the knowledge you have of the forest industry. That's a compliment.

Ms. Elizabeth May: Thank you.

Mr. Werner Schmidt: I'd like to ask you, just to be sure, are you representing the Sierra Club here today?

Ms. Elizabeth May: That's correct.

Mr. Werner Schmidt: Okay. That's what I thought, but I wanted to make absolutely sure, because from some of the comments you made, I wasn't quite sure who you were representing. That's not necessarily a bad thing. It's necessary for us to be balanced from time to time, and you've indicated that very clearly.

The significant part, though, is that in these committees, very often, the chair's remarks notwithstanding, we do put aside our partisan differences and look at the issues. That's what we're trying to do with this forestry practices issue. I really want to impress upon you that this particular committee is doing exactly what you've suggested we do. When we did go through the Great Bear Rain Forest last spring, that was a very significant study. And we're only partway through this thing.

The question I have for you is why do we have to have this confrontational, protagonist-antagonist kind of feeling out there? I don't think it's necessary, and yet it seems to be there. Surely there is a better way to approach this. You've come out very clearly, for example, saying there shall be no more harvesting of old-growth forest. Well, why not? In some cases definitely there should not be, but why a blanket statement that says there shall be no more of this kind of stuff? Where's the scientific basis for that kind of statement?

Ms. Elizabeth May: Actually, the Sierra Club policy position is not that there should be no more cutting in old-growth forests.

Mr. Werner Schmidt: Isn't that what you just said about five minutes ago?

Ms. Elizabeth May: No, I was saying that was one of the things the Canadian Forestry Service was looking at, trying to shift the logging that takes place to plantation-based forestry. This is the sawoff—no pun intended—that the New Zealand government arrived at. They set aside for most of their primary forest an intensive fibre production on plantations. The environmental community in Canada and the Sierra Club have concerns about that model, because of the intensity of the production in the plantation.

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Mr. Werner Schmidt: Let me clarify that. So you are not opposed to cutting down old-growth forests.

Ms. Elizabeth May: No. We are opposed to clear-cut logging in many different forest—

Mr. Werner Schmidt: That's a different issue. That's a matter of management now.

Ms. Elizabeth May: That's right.

Mr. Werner Schmidt: That's a totally different kind of question.

Ms. Elizabeth May: Right now, 90% of everything that's logged in Canada is clear-cut logged, and 90% of everything that's logged in Canada is in primary forests that have never been logged before. So when you put those together, you get a picture that says we're probably going very rapidly, without a real track record on how these forests renew themselves.

One of the concerns we have about climate change is that climate change, on its own, is going to be the biggest stress our forests have ever faced. If we're simultaneously exposing them to massive stress because of logging—

Mr. Werner Schmidt: Okay, I don't want you to repeat your whole climate change thing again. I've heard that at least three times already.

Ms. Elizabeth May: Okay.

Mr. Werner Schmidt: The important thing here, in my mind, is the recognition of forestry management practices. You made a statement here about their registration—I think certification is the actual word that's used. Do you agree that there should be different kinds of certifying bodies throughout the world?

Ms. Elizabeth May: I think there are, and there's no objection—

Mr. Werner Schmidt: That's not the question. Should there be? We know there are.

Ms. Elizabeth May: Should there be? I don't know why not. If they fulfil different purposes, then perhaps....

Mr. Werner Schmidt: So you're not opposed to different kinds of certification bodies.

Ms. Elizabeth May: What's important is that the ultimate consumers—the audience for those certification standards—have to know why they've been accomplished and what they represent. The statement about the ISO standards for quality, the ISO 14000 series, has always been that it's consistent quality management. If you're making a really lousy widget, if you make it consistently, you get that certification stamp. As long as people know what that stands for, it's a commitment that's different from FSC. There's no reason we wouldn't want to have different kinds of certification schemes.

Mr. Werner Schmidt: Good. Okay. I really appreciate that.

We had a group here yesterday that suggested 13 criteria that a certification body ought to meet in order to be recognized as a legitimate certifying body. Are you familiar with that group at all?

Ms. Elizabeth May: I'm not—

Mr. Werner Schmidt: This was the Canadian Pulp and Paper Association. They presented a brief to us and had some 13 criteria they would use.

Do you have similar criteria you would use in identifying a recognized certifying body?

Ms. Elizabeth May: The certifying organization of which we are members is the Forest Stewardship Council. They have criteria and work differently.... This is another difference between the Canadian Standards Association approach and the Forest Stewardship Council approach. The Forest Stewardship Council certifies the certifier, which is a credential that particular company can carry forward, and it can bring the FSC name to a particular forest operation.

In general, I haven't seen the Canadian Pulp and Paper Association's particular 13 criteria list for certifying, but I'm sure it's appropriate.

Mr. Werner Schmidt: I'm not totally satisfied with the list because I don't think it's specific enough. I think it's pretty good. It's a good start, but I would like to really encourage you to do that.

It's just like university—you're obviously university graduates. There are degrees from universities A, B, C and so on down the line. They all have BA degrees, BSc degrees, or whatever the case might be, but nevertheless there's a certain standard that must be applied to all if they're going to be recognized degrees. A similar kind of thing ought to be happening there.

I wonder if you wouldn't be well advised as a group to develop those kinds of criteria, so the whole world might know that this is a bona fide certifying organization, and if a forest company wishes to be accepted internationally it should be certified by that kind of group. It would be very helpful.

Ms. Elizabeth May: That's a very good point. The Forest Stewardship Council is in a sense a magnificent experiment, in that it was created by private sector industry people, environmental groups, first nations, and others. We've been struggling with the auditing process over certifiers and how to avoid conflict of interest. If a certifier starts working for a forest company, they shouldn't be the one that certifies the final product. There are issues we learn as we go, about the appropriateness of various certifiers.

I sense you have to vote.

Mr. Werner Schmidt: Yes, that's right.

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The Chair: That's a good indication, in the sense that's prevailing upon us.

Mr. Werner Schmidt: It wasn't me, it was the Bloc.

The Chair: Ms. May and Ms. Morbia, thank you very much for coming before us, and for the frankness and the forthrightness of your responses.

I regret, on behalf of all committee members, that we have to cut this a little short, and that I rushed you through some of the responses. Unfortunately, in the course of the last several weeks the House of Commons has taken on a particular political climate that causes us to adjust our schedules, literally on the fly.

We thank you very much for being here with us and sharing with us your insights. They'll be more than useful. Thank you again.

Ms. Elizabeth May: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The Chair: Gentlemen, Mr. Schmidt, 8.15 tomorrow morning right here.

Thank you. The meeting is adjourned to the call of the chair.