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, March 29, 2000

• 1542

[English]

The Vice-Chair (Mr. David Chatters (Athabasca, Canadian Alliance)): I call the meeting to order.

I'd ask Mr. Coon to come forward to the table, please.

Colleagues, today we continue our study of Canadian forestry management practices with the Conservation Council of New Brunswick, represented by Mr. David Coon.

We'll go right to your presentation, which is usually about ten minutes, give or take, and then we'll go to questions and answers. So you can just go ahead with your presentation.

Mr. David Coon (Policy Director, Conservation Council of New Brunswick): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

It's not usually about ten minutes when I do it, but I know you usually want it to take ten minutes, so I will do my best because I look forward to the discussion following.

One of the great and interesting things about New Brunswick and why I'm so glad to be here is that we have had intensive forestry going on since 1805, and I mean big time. You wouldn't believe what kind of impact manual labour can have and did have in the 19th century.

Why was this? It's a particular piece of history where Napoleon blocked the Baltic ports in 1805. Britain lost their supply of timber and turned to Canada, and specifically to New Brunswick, at the time, for their timber supplies. The pace picked up for forestry operations at that point and they have never looked back.

Interestingly, it's because of the tremendously intensive logging that was going on at the time that by about the 1840s things were going bananas on the floor of the provincial legislature. There were rancorous debates about the sustainability of forestry as it was being practised then in New Brunswick, to the point that the lieutenant governor of the day commented on it. It wasn't just the members of the legislature.

Some decades later, in the 1880s, there was actually a serious proposal put forward in the legislature, which was passed but was never proclaimed, to establish a massive wilderness area in north-central New Brunswick, where the Appalachian mountains go through our province.

So it's fascinating that these concerns about sustainability date back that far. Of course, in the 1840s they were concerned about wood supply with respect to the availability of large red spruce and white pine.

• 1545

Today the concerns are still about wood supply, but now they have moved on to overall wood supply, to looking at the fibre of whatever species to support the level of processing we have in the province. Obviously, there is also interest in wilderness resources, which are now small and quite scattered. There's quite a lot of work going on with the province around that issue right now.

Our particular preoccupation is with the crown forests, with the forest commons in the province, which are about 50% of our forest lands. Most significantly and most telling for provinces that came much later into the game of intensive forestry is that we are now seeing declines in our crown forests in the abundance and distribution of certain tree species and in the abundance and distribution of actual forest types. That diversity is being lost, in fact, to the point where Dr. Judy Loo from the Canadian Forest Service, at a major conference in our region organized by the premier's Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, pointed out that it's likely this was affecting the forest function.

When we think about sustainability in forestry it's important to clarify what we're trying to sustain. In the context of New Brunswick, there are two things. One, on the forest side, is the healthy functioning of the forest. If we want timber from the forest, if we want fibre from the forest in perpetuity, then we do have to worry about things like whether or not nutrient cycling is occurring in an optimum way. We need to be concerned about whether or not the whole system is continuing to be a self-managing system with the capacity for renewal that God put there.

These kinds of issues are coming to the fore in New Brunswick on the forest side. On the other side are community concerns around the increasing inability of the forest resources to sustain our forest-dependent communities. One of the interesting and worrisome things for you to recognize is that in the middle of our vast crown land resources in the province we have communities with some of the highest levels of unemployment in the province.

If you're familiar with New Brunswick at all or have made trips there, the work in Boiestown, Doaktown, and that part of the Miramichi Valley has diminished so dramatically. There are a number of reasons for that, not the least of which is mechanization.

From a community perspective, it is interesting because it puts people in the position of...we do a lot of work with respect to fisheries management. An example would be if inshore fishermen were unable to go fishing because someone out there with a large trawler had access to those fish and was going back and forth fishing with them. They would have to stay home at the wharf and sit there unemployed and watch those resources being caught by someone else.

That's what's happening in some of our forest-dependent communities that don't have...particularly in terms of work within the woods themselves on the resource.

It's important in these discussions around sustainable forestry to agree on what it is we're trying to sustain. If it's simply wood supply, then the discussion is interesting but more straightforward. When you're talking about issues such as whether or not we have built in enough room for error in applying the models...we know the problems with the models in resource management. We saw that with the cod collapse.

Are the models conservative enough, are our assumptions conservative enough, do we have an appropriate management system in place, and so on, so that we have a fairly good degree of certainty about what the future wood supply is going to be and what the impact of the silviculture is going to be, etc.? There are important discussions around those issues, but it's much more straightforward.

• 1550

If we're trying to sustain the forests in terms of their actual ecological health, in terms of their ability to function, and in terms of their ability to provide environmental services to us and to sustain forest-dependent communities, then we have a much more complicated discussion and debate.

Currently, in New Brunswick, when you look at it from that perspective, we're not on crown land practising sustainable forestry, and that is unfortunate. In fact, next week many of the players are coming together, the people who work in the mills, the anglers and hunters through the Wildlife Federation, ourselves, the Conservation Council, which is a provincial environmental group, the Federation of Woodlot Owners that you heard from last week, the Federation of Labour and some aboriginal groups. We are going to look at the state of forest health on crown lands and talk about our respective views of where the forest commons should go in the future in terms of its management. It's going to be very interesting. It's the first time for all of us to sit together and talk about these issues, and we'll have resource people coming in to talk about that to us.

In my brief I present a little evidence of some of the decline in terms of bough diversity within the forest and the implications for healthy forest functioning or ecosystem functioning there. This is work that's been done both by the province, the Department of Natural Resources, and by the Canadian Forest Service, formerly Forestry Canada.

One of the issues in New Brunswick that's really driving this is all of our crown land is under licence to eight or so companies that own mills in the province.

I recall Roméo LeBlanc many years ago now when he was fisheries minister saying that processors should process and fishermen should fish. If you apply that to forestry in New Brunswick, that's not happening. The processors are looking after forest management and therefore tend to be engineering the forests on crown lands to fit the needs of the mills rather than managing the forest for its health and vigour and the diversity it has, which would supply a much greater variety of wood products than currently we have now.

By managing in essentially an agricultural way it creates these kinds of problems I've talked about. Obviously, the way we're managing now is much different from the 19th century, but what's interesting is this approach to management that's been taken on crown land in the last, say, 25 years. Essentially, it has perpetuated the trends that started in the 19th century, and I won't go into those details, but they're in the brief for you to see.

The question is, what do we do? We certainly agree with the Federation of Woodlot Owners president who often says we need to manage for the health and vigour of all those species occurring on crown land. Interestingly enough, in New Brunswick we have plenty of experience and knowledge among woodlot owners and a growing number of contractors who work on woodlots, which represent about 30% of the woodlands, to manage in that kind of way. Those are the kinds of concerns you bring to your own woodlot if it's been in your family for a number of generations. You're trying to make sure it's there for generations to come, to make a living from or, if it's small, to supplement your income along the way.

There's that wonderful experience there. Interestingly enough, we're working with the Federation of Woodlot Owners to heighten public awareness about that experience on private woodlots, to profile the work on woodlots around the province as an example of different approaches to forest management that have lower impacts and yet economically bear fruit. People make a living from doing it that way, including contractors, who we'll also be profiling. This is bread and butter stuff. We're quite excited about this work that we're doing, about profiling that.

I will get back to forest management on crown lands in New Brunswick. On managing the forest to fit the mills, in a sense, we're very much focused on volume-based production, and that's problematic in terms of forest sustainability. What we're going to have to do is move away from the strict focus on volume-based production and seek a greater balance whereby we have more value-based production to balance with the volume-based production. That sounds sort of odd when I say it that way, but what I mean by it is increasing the number of forest products from our crown land based on higher-value trees, bigger trees, species that are more valuable than some of the other ones, and having less focus on trying to maximize volume and yield to provide huge volumes of fibre. That is the way we can get at some of these problems concerning sustainability.

• 1555

We are in an enviable position to do so in New Brunswick, for a number of reasons, I think. One, we have the Biodiversity Convention that Canada has signed, so it should not put us at a competitive disadvantage with our competitors, as we are all supposed to be implementing this convention to do the right thing with respect to the sustainability of living systems like forests.

We have the national forest strategy, which is impressive, flowing out of the national forest accord, which actually is the framework the province is trying to use in developing its goals and objectives for crown land. But on the implementation side, we're not there yet.

We have the forest management planning system that's available, and that could move things in this direction. In terms of management planning, it's a pretty good system, and we have, as I said, experience among many people who work in the woods that could be applied.

We also have an ecological land classification system, which you really need to do this kind of forest management planning. One of our biggest companies, the Irvings, are starting to apply this on their private lands, and I think the provincial government is starting to move in that direction. The province developed it, initially to use it for designing a protected area system, not for forest management, but it's certainly applicable to that.

As a citizen-based environmental group, our thinking on this has been, with respect to forestry.... A lot of our efforts have been to promote reform to the land tenure system on crown land, to incorporate a community-based approach to management that would provide greater access to people and communities in New Brunswick in regard to the crown land resources, but which, at the same time, would activate the stewardship that comes with that kind of community responsibility and management.

Obviously it would require some new institutional arrangements on a regional basis in order to pursue that, but we're quite excited by the prospects. Frankly, it's the kind of resource management approach that much of our work in this area is focused on, whether it's in fisheries or forestry. It's a growing movement, not just in Canada but internationally.

We see a lot of positive signs. For the first time, the provincial government is going to be requiring the licensees in their next go-around, their next five-year plans beginning in 2002, to actually meet some very well thought out, first-step biodiversity goals. It's interesting. They certainly are tentative steps, but they're very much science-based, very much a change from where we've been, and that too is encouraging.

But there needs to be a bit of a longer-term vision and more political will to move this forward. The current government, the new government, is committed to doing a whole review of how we deal with our crown lands, so once again there's an opportunity for some change there.

The final thing that's going on is how aboriginal logging has become a reality on crown land. Currently aboriginal communities hold a 5% allocation of the annual allowable cut, but on April 5, Justice Lourdon will be bringing down his judgment on how the Marshall decision applies or doesn't apply to logging. In any event, whichever way he decides, in a sense, the fact that aboriginal logging is now part of the operations on crown land is going to bring about, I think, further reforms in terms of access and management practices.

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With respect to the federal government's role here, we're very concerned about any attempts to do any public relations campaigns that don't give an accurate picture of what's going on. As I said, in our view, forestry as it's practised on crown lands in New Brunswick today is not sustainable, but we are working away as a provincial environmental organization, as are many others in civil society, to try to change those things.

We're seeing some movement within government itself in response not just to us but to woodlot owners, to all kinds of people, right down to community planning commissions, for Pete's sake, who have concerns about forestry issues. We have a long road ahead of us yet, but it's interesting, and we're in interesting times, I think, in terms of how forest management may change in our province.

As for the federal government's role, we have a real need for more focused research on forest ecology. The research that is done through Forestry Canada around forest ecology, around conservation biology, around resource and forest conservation issues, is invaluable. There's no other body in Canada doing that work.

We have a large regional research centre in Fredericton and it's invaluable, but I think there needs to be more support for it. We've almost lost it a couple of times in various government reorganizations, in this and that and in budgets over the years, and it cannot be replaced. But it needs to be more focused, and certainly, of course, better funded.

We also see an important role for the federal government, through the Canadian Forest Service, in continuing to support the first nations forestry program. This has been very positive in New Brunswick.

A colleague of mine, Steve Ginnish, from Eel Ground, a Mi'kmaq community in the Miramichi, is very involved in this and is the head of their forestry operation in Eel Ground. If you have the chance to invite him to your committee, I would highly recommend it. It's very impressive, what they're trying to do, and he and that community have been a very strong force throughout aboriginal communities in New Brunswick in terms of playing a leadership role in sustainable forest management approaches, tied to increasing the economic independence and the opportunities for the people in the communities.

Finally, I think there needs to be appropriate assistance for communities that are forest dependent and for woodlot owners to be the kinds of stewards they wish to be. When it comes to land, you have to want to take care of the land, obviously. You have to be motivated. You have to know how to do it; that's another thing. But you have to be able to afford to do it as well.

We would certainly support the recommendations that were brought here by the Federation of Woodlot Owners last week. They made a lot of good recommendations. I haven't repeated them in the brief here specifically but have just alluded to them in this last statement; they would help that along with respect to woodlot owners. I think you could look at those and see how they also might aid forest-dependent communities down the road.

Those are the comments I wanted to bring to you. We have interesting situations in our province. We have a long history. We're a small province, so in a sense everyone knows everyone in terms of all of the players on this issue. I'm not saying that we don't have major battles, that we don't have major differences of opinion, but, for example, woodcutters on the Miramichi who had problems with something that was going on in the woods with respect to harvesting called us to come up and take a look. Woodcutters on the Miramichi called David Suzuki to invite him to come and speak on the Miramichi for a fundraiser for the Conservation Council of New Brunswick, our organization.

The dynamic in New Brunswick may be a little different, particularly from what you've been focusing on in regard to the west coast and what you might be used to. We're not as polarized as things are on the west coast. I'm not passing any kind of judgment on that; I'm just trying to give you a bit of a window on how things are occurring in New Brunswick. We are looking forward to next week, when a lot of the interests involved in and concerned about forestry are getting together to talk about a way forward.

Thank you.

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The Vice-Chair (Mr. David Chatters): Thank you, Mr. Coon. You did indeed play fast and loose with that ten minutes.

We'll go first to the opposition then. Mr. Duncan.

Mr. Yvon Godin (Acadie—Bathurst, NDP): I don't know if it's possible, but could I raise my question, because I have another meeting, if you don't mind?

Mr. John Duncan (Vancouver Island North, Canadian Alliance): Go ahead.

Mr. Yvon Godin: I appreciate that. Thank you.

[Translation]

While I'm not someone who holds Irving in the highest regard, I do want to give credit where credit is due, and that's in the area of sustainable forestry practices. I think we need to recognize what this company has accomplished in New Brunswick.

Based on your experience—and correct me if I'm wrong—how many other places are there in New Brunswick where the situation isn't quite the same? What can the federal government do to get certain companies to change their attitude? Let me use an example that is close to home, namely northeastern New Brunswick. You're pretty familiar with the situation in the Acadian region. What could the federal government be doing there? For instance, do you think it would be a good idea to create a model forest in the region and then monitor the situation, as we have seen happen in the southern part of the province? Model forests have been established in Rivière-du-Loup, in Hussar and in other parts of the country. What can be done to get certain people to rethink their position on this matter?

I'd also like to say something about the practice of clear cutting. The new government wants to make some changes with regard to stumpage. It wants to introduce a requirement whereby all timber resulting from clear cutting must be harvested. I've noticed that clear cutting has been occurring on some private woodlots in recent weeks. This seems to be an attempt by owners to avoid having to comply with these changes. I'd like to hear your views on this subject.

[English]

Mr. David Coon: When you say private ownership, do you mean woodlot owners or the...? You mean woodlot owners.

There are a couple of things, I guess, and as a good New Brunswicker, I had one ear trying to listen in French and the other ear listening to the translation. So I'm a bit mixed up here.

Mr. Yvon Godin: That's what we call bilingual.

Mr. David Coon: That's what we call bilingual in Charlotte County, I guess.

With respect to private woodlots, yes, there are all kinds of problems. I didn't want to get into a lot of them here, but with respect to private woodlots, there have been problems, and there are a variety of things that have gone on.

One of them has been that back during the recession the provincial legislation was changed such that the private woodlot owner organizations lost their ability to play any meaningful role in forest management with private woodlots within their regions. They essentially lost the single-desk selling through the marketing boards we used to have. They also lost their bargaining power on price with the large forest companies. I must say, at the time, with the woodlot owners, we specifically raised the negative implications there would be on woodlots, and they've come to pass in some cases. So that's one problem.

Another problem is that the province has been selling to the highest bidder little woodlots that they have taken some years back because of tax sales, and of course the highest bidder is just buying them to clean them off.

So there have been these kinds of concerns on private lands, but we have a good system of woodlot owner organizations right across the province—a good system of marketing boards, a good system of extension. We support the work they're doing on private land. In fact, we rent their floor of our building, so we have a close working relationship literally.

So those are all issues on private land. I guess one of the things we're hoping for from our project to profile the most positive things that are happening on private land is that it will encourage more contractors and woodlot owners to adopt those approaches. There are various barriers to doing that, which I think the woodlot owners, when they were here last week, spent some time speaking to and made some suggestions on how they could be overcome.

In the northeast, in the Acadian peninsula and so on, on the Miramichi, and on the north shore, one of the biggest problems is that people have lost their access to the crown land since 1982. So you have people who need work and cannot get work on the crown land. And the companies are cutting right in their back yards.

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I think we're going to see increasing local militancy in those regions to bring about some change. That pressure is being very much felt already by the provincial government.

We're dealing with a lot of one-industry towns. We're dealing with a few companies like the Irvings, who, because of their economic importance, wield a lot of political influence in the province.

That makes it difficult for provincial governments to have the space they should have to move, which is why it is that much more important for people at the community level to be organized to help move this forward meaningfully. That's why we've been heavily involved in organizing this event that's happening next week to bring together from all around the province woodcutters, woodlot owners, environmentalists, hunters and anglers, and so on to look at a way forward.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. David Chatters): Mr. Provenzano.

Mr. Carmen Provenzano (Sault Ste. Marie, Lib.): Thank you, Mr. Chair.

You commented about communities dependent on forestry resources and made a point that sustainable forestry requires sustainable forests, and that to have sustainable forests, you have to have the proper timber management practices.

I think it's correct to state that in most areas across the country, timber management practices do not equate to ecosystem management practices. I don't know how far we're away from that, but we're not managing the ecosystems. They're not synonymous terms—forestry management and ecosystem management.

You made some comments about value as opposed to volume, and those are interesting. But the implications are, if you went to that system, that it would do away with harvesting such as clear-cutting. I don't think clear-cutting would fit the bill. Even if it would, if you went from volume to value, what implications would that have for the supply, just in New Brunswick? If you were able to implement what you're suggesting, what would happen in terms of supplying the New Brunswick marketplace?

Mr. David Coon: Clearly, the overall volume would be reduced. In terms of the forestry practices themselves, it would depend on what part of the forest you're talking about. If you're taking this kind of approach, some areas in our province lend themselves to a kind of even-age management where a style of clear-cutting is the most appropriate thing to do—not the typical clear-cuts you might think about, but a kind of clear-cut, an even-age management system—just because of the nature of the forest there. I know New Brunswick is small, but it's incredibly diverse, so this is the case.

In other parts of the province the appropriate way to manage those forests would be on more of a selection-harvesting basis. This is also being very simplistic here, to be black and white about it, but that's the case. It just depends.

What I'm saying is we'd end up with some areas that would be more focused on volume production and some that would lend themselves more to a kind of value-based production, where you're adding value not just to the end product, but also to the woods through the kind of forest management and harvesting you're doing to get the species and sizes you want.

This kind of transition is something you would look at over a period of time. It is not something you can switch overnight. We have a particular way of doing things now, and there are various problems attached to it. You can't just flick a switch. But it's a question of having some kind of long-term vision and appropriate policies that will start moving us in a new direction, so you end up with a better balance between these two things.

The reality is that we're going to see a rationalization on the volume side with some of the big mills closing down in the next decade or so. The Canadian Pulp and Paper Association, for one, in the eastern Canadian context, has forecast quite a significant rationalization, as they call it, for a variety of reasons.

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One of the things to be concerned about in New Brunswick economically is that you don't want to be unprepared for that happening. Then where are you? You have a few mills left and the rest of the forest-based economy is in tatters. There are real concerns about whether some of those mills aren't seeing that writing on the wall and are pushing the envelope at this point until they're done. Then we're left with very little to work with.

Mr. Carmen Provenzano: I have one more question. It seems pretty clear that we can't talk about forestry regeneration and think just in terms of the regeneration of the trees. The forest is more than the trees. We're talking about the ability of the ecosystem to regenerate itself, to provide that sustainable forest in the longest term.

A voice: Good point.

Mr. Carmen Provenzano: Is it a quantum leap we're looking for, where the stakeholders could come to the table and talk about the things you're raising here? In effect we would get into ecosystem management; we would adopt forestry practices that are sensitive to the ecosystem and still practical enough to allow an industry to function in a profitable way and to meet the supply requirements.

Mr. David Coon: At current levels of production in the province on the processing side, no. On an individual mill basis, yes.

In a sense, we have a position now like the one with the fisheries, where we have too much processing capacity for what the forest can supply. That's in terms of supply. We've gone way beyond what the forest can sustainably supply. We are now worrying about whether the forest is being maintained from an ecological perspective in terms of its ability to continue to function and provide environmental services. So it is a huge shift.

We have different types of tenures in the province. It's not a huge shift for a lot of woodlot owners. A lot of woodlot owners are already taking that approach, and a growing number of contractors are already taking that approach. We only see that growing.

On crown land, there's a real potential for this to move forward in some parts of the crown land if the provincial government is actually going to open up the tenure system and make some changes to it. One could imagine some parts of the crown land being devoted to moving in this direction and others staying within the current system, as we move in this new direction I'm talking about.

What you're talking about is how we visualize this change occurring. There are all kinds of possibilities, but it's nothing where you can just flick a switch on.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. David Chatters): Mr. Duncan.

Mr. John Duncan: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

New Brunswick is an interesting laboratory for forestry, based on your ownership pattern and the history. As I read your document, I was thinking to myself what an interesting influence Napoleon had on forestry in the world. When you go to Germany, you see that after the Middle Ages, Germany was basically deforested. It was Napoleon's regime that created the conditions that actually reforested most of Germany. You'll see that a lot of the forest actually dates to his tenure. At the same time, as a consequence of his actions in Europe, the forests in New Brunswick were devastated by another party. That's just a historical anecdote.

You do make a comment about the fact that aboriginal rights regarding logging in New Brunswick should be a positive thing. I'm wondering why you would make that assumption without any clarification. For example, the largest unregulated clear-cut that I've seen in Canada was on a reserve near Morley, Alberta. I'm a little puzzled as to how you could offer that up as an opinion without any evidence to support it. I don't accept that as a doctrine at all.

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Mr. David Coon: I wasn't suggesting it as a doctrine. This specifically regards the Marshall decision and it's therefore a treaty right. If it turns out that the Marshall decision applies to logging, it's a collective right that would be held by the communities. It's at the community level that you have a greater chance of exercising stewardship.

The proof or demonstration of that to us is what the Eel Ground community has done on the Miramichi, which is taking what essentially was a free-for-all in the past, where everyone went in an unorganized way and just worked away, and put in place what we would call community management. We've used it as an example in workshops we've run. Initially they started out fairly traditionally from a forestry perspective in terms of the management approach, and then people in the community started to say this has this problem, this has that problem, and you need to make changes. They were responsive to that. It's just darn impressive. If you ever have a chance to tour what they've done, I would encourage it.

The point ultimately is that it opens the way to community forestry. If the treaty we're talking about also covers forestry in the province, then the province is going to have to look at this community forestry approach more seriously because that's the one that naturally falls out of this collective ownership of a treaty right by the aboriginal communities. In terms of fairness and equity, I think the province is going to have to start looking at that approach for forestry activities by everyone else on crown land.

Mr. John Duncan: I wanted to explore a little bit the private land versus public land question because it's obviously integral to the discussion here today.

The major forest producer in the country is British Columbia, which is about 95% crown land. There's a perception amongst many people that actually the public lands in many cases are managed better than the private lands, where the current taxation policy is actually an incentive to liquidate, as you explained with some of the assets the crown has taken over and then put up for auction. That same sort of scenario plays itself out.

At the same time, I'm quietly a proponent of private ownership. I think stewardship can be the right way to go, with the right taxation policies and the right incentives.

There's a suggestion in your document that private ownership is always better, but in actual fact are you not asking for significant...? In your document you're not asking for significant changes in order to make that happen, but are you not hoping that private land ownership and stewardship incentives would be a major thing that should be promoted by both levels of government?

Mr. David Coon: The way our crown lands are managed is basically the way the large industrial owners manage their private land, in this very agricultural approach. So I don't think private ownership in that way is going to help. In fact, more private ownership would just perpetuate the problem if the ownership were industrial.

With respect to individual woodlot owners and their own private holdings, many of which are family enterprises, you have a whole other dynamic that comes into play. People are thinking about their father and their grandfather and how they looked after that ground. They want their children to have some benefits from that ground. That kind of thinking doesn't come into play with large industrial ownership. It can't. It's a whole other category. So, no, I'm not suggesting that.

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The Vice-Chair (Mr. David Chatters): Mr. St. Denis.

Mr. Brent St. Denis (Algoma—Manitoulin, Lib.): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you for being here, Mr. Coon.

Mr. Duncan raised the example, which I assume is true, that Napoleon made efforts to reforest Germany in a way that created pressures elsewhere. In your opening remarks you mentioned the pressure on New Brunswick many generations ago. Obviously, given the consumers' demand for wood and wood products and the similar demand for low prices, an effort to put pressure on an area here to improve sustainability, which would normally increase costs, will only drive the demand for forests somewhere else, presumably in the third world.

This leads me to ask about forest certification, which I think is an attempt to try to balance the situation worldwide. A sustainable forest here is just as important as a sustainable forest half a world away.

Could you describe, if you can, the state of forest certification in New Brunswick? I noticed there was a reference made to the Irving company having abandoned an FSC certification undertaking and switching to an SFI undertaking. I'm just wondering if you know about that and have any comments on that. We're trying to get an idea about forestry in New Brunswick in an international context.

Mr. David Coon: There has been a lot of discussion about certification. In fact, a huge conference on this issue was just held in New Brunswick, which was attended by 300 people. It was organized by the premier's Round Table on the Environment and the Economy. I had the pleasure of being on the panel and giving some closing remarks and reflections on the two days, I think it was.

There are all kinds of certification systems, as you know. Some of them do different things, so they're not comparable. At this point our sense is that it's fine to have a variety of certification systems. Why not have a certification system that rewards the greenest of the green woodlot owners, who manage in a very low-impact way that is equivalent to, say, organic farmers who get organic certification? Then have another level of certification that is not the greenest of the green but fairly decent forest management according to some recognized criteria and so on. There is obviously going to have to be another level of certification for woodlot owners, if woodlot owners are going to want to get certified, because the current systems don't suit individual woodlot owners. So I think there's a mix of things.

Certification to us is not going to be in the end the big driver of anything. There's this desperate rush on the part of companies to try to get certified because some of their customers are saying, we want you to be certified under this or that.

For example, under the FSC system, which I think you are going to be hearing about next week, there's a regional component to it to deal with the different forest types. The regional standards that have been developed for our forest area, the Acadian forest, are different from other areas. A lot of companies are going to have a hard time complying with those standards. We don't see that as a problem. So let that apply to the greenest of the green.

There are all kinds of other certification systems available for others who want to be certified. Woodlot owners are exploring a couple of other certification options. In the southern part of our province we have the Canadian Standards Association. The woodlot owners organization has been involved there, and it's very impressive.

So I think we'll have a variety of certification systems, and for the buyers and consumers, as long as those certification systems are clear and transparent and spell out what you get under that certification, then I don't see the problem. I think everyone rushing to come under the banner of one single certification program is creating havoc and causing wars between the different certification systems, and it isn't helping anybody.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. David Chatters): Mr. Reed.

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

First of all, I want to apologize to Mr. Coon for being late. I don't know if we'll ever solve the problem of conflicting committees.

An hon. member: You're a victim.

Mr. Julian Reed: I got shot down today.

You may have already explained this, but you did say something as I was coming in that caught my attention. That had to do with private owners having no access to crown land. That seems rather strange to me. Can you explain why there is a policy like that?

Mr. David Coon: Everybody has a different explanation of why that's the case. Historically, in New Brunswick we've had large operators controlling much of what happens on the crown land, whether it was the timber barons of the 19th century or the modern-day crown land licensees. But in 1982 that situation was taken to an extreme when all licences on crown land were cancelled, and ten were established and made available only to those enterprises that had mills in the province. At that time the province had decided to embark on an approach to forest management that they thought would ensure a sustainable supply of fibre to the mills over the long term and that the best way to do that was, in a sense, to put the mills in charge of organizing the forests in a way that maximized their yield to supply the mills.

That has had two effects: it has excluded a lot of people from earning a living working on the crown land, and it has, as I mentioned earlier, perpetuated the trend that began a long time ago in our forests of simplifying them and undermining their ecological functioning, their diversity, and turning them into much more of an agricultural operation, which on crown land is probably not appropriate unless—

Mr. Julian Reed: It sounds like the reverse of the direction the rest of the world is going in in terms of deregulating, giving the little guy the opportunity to get in if in fact he or she can't, and so on. Even in lowly old Ontario here the small operator can go out and bid on crown areas. I have a colleague in another business who does precisely that. It's not necessarily large holdings, but it's an area of second-growth forest. He is an excellent operator, and he's known as an excellent operator, but he's not a big-time operator. He has three people. I find it very strange that any government in this modern day and age would create de facto monopolies.

Mr. David Coon: As I say, it was in 1982, and a lot has changed since then. I think we're going to see perhaps an opening for some change around that tenure arrangement.

We've been advocating notions around things such as private woodlot owner licences. If you're doing a good job managing your private woodlot and there's a little piece of crown land adjacent, you should be able to have a licence to incorporate that into your approach to woodlot management. Maybe it would make your operation more economically viable because it would give you a bit more area to work with. The woodlot owners have promoted similar things, and we've promoted other types of licences on crown land as well.

We have had this very centralized, top-down system since 1982. I think we're going to see some change, but it has been a long time coming.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. David Chatters): There's time for a short second round, Mr. Duncan, if you like.

Mr. John Duncan: Okay.

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I've asked everybody who has come before the committee about the softwood lumber agreement. Obviously, New Brunswick is not a signatory to that agreement, but the non-signatory provinces have had a rapid and large increase in exports to the U.S. during the period of the softwood lumber agreement. How much impact do you think that has had on things you've witnessed in terms of the forestry volume and production focus in the province of New Brunswick?

Mr. David Coon: I don't think a great deal. Our overcapacity problem is domestic and was established some time ago, beginning in the early eighties. I don't think that's been a big factor. I'm not saying it's not a factor, because I'm probably not the right person to comment on it, but I don't think it's been a huge driver because we have such an overcapacity problem on the processing side within the province itself.

Mr. John Duncan: Really the mandate of this committee right now, and what we're supposed to be looking at, is the potential repercussions of the disparaging campaigns that have been run against Canadian forestry practices. Do you think those campaigns to date have had any negative impact on your operations at any level in New Brunswick—at any level meaning private lands, industrial lands, woodlots, crown lands?

Mr. David Coon: I doubt it. I suspect the only major impacts have been from a few of the customers of some of those companies who want a particular certification system when they buy their products. So that's probably the only one. Those campaigns, as I understand them, are pretty much run on issues of wilderness protection, at their essence. You should ask the industry that. We're an environmental group, so I don't know how they felt about it. Certainly, the woodlot owners we deal with haven't noticed any impact on them.

Mr. John Duncan: My final question, just so I understand, is how joined at the hip are you? How close are you to the Federation of Woodlot Owners as a group?

Mr. David Coon: Our organization works a lot with primary producers—woodlot owners, farm people, fishermen—in promoting approaches to resource conservation and changes to policy to foster those that do a better job sustaining the resources in the ecosystem that supports the communities that are dependent on it. As a result, we work with those groups regularly. We have no formal attachment to them, and we don't see eye to eye on everything, of course, but that's been an approach of our organization for some time now. We see that as a way. Where we have mutual interests, we ask how we can be allies with our fellow citizens who are woodlot owners, fishermen, or farmers who are on the front lines and who are the ones who can be and should be the stewards, first and foremost, of those resources. We find that our interests intersect sufficiently that we work on a number of things.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. David Chatters): Thank you, Mr. Coon, for coming and presenting your views to us. I'm sure we'll take those comments and concerns into consideration in the development of our report.

I'd like to adjourn the meeting now to the call of the chair. We will resume tomorrow at 11 a.m. in Room 269, West Block. Thank you.