STANDING COMMITTEE ON RESOURCES
Mr. James DeWolfe
MR. CHAIRMAN: I will call the committee to order. Good morning and thank you for coming on such a dirty day. We have with us the Nova Scotia Federation of Anglers and Hunters. Bob Bancroft and Tony Rodgers are here to join us. I think everyone has probably met these gentlemen in the past, if not today.
We have one replacement here today from the Liberal caucus and representing the Liberal caucus, Mr. Russell MacKinnon. I have already introduced him so we will go around, starting this way, with the next.
[The committee members introduced themselves.]
MR. CHAIRMAN: As members perhaps drop in, we will introduce them a little later when the timing is appropriate.
Without further ado, I will turn it over to you, Mr. Bancroft, and we are looking very favourably to hearing your report today.
MR. BOB BANCROFT: Thank you very much. Should I stand up? It is a standing committee. (Laughter)
MR. CHAIRMAN: No it is not necessary.
MR. BANCROFT: Well, those of you who have looked over what I have written here and what Tony and I have put together are probably wondering whether we have any sense of humour or not at all. Tony, I would ask you to just add on to anything you feel that I miss here. We are a bit of an unlikely duo in the sense that normally Tony represents the federation. I want to thank this committee very much for asking us here today because I think it is an honour and we appreciate the opportunity very much.
With regard to resources, the very first thing I put down when I started thinking about this was forestry. I should explain to some of you who may not be aware that I worked for the provincial government with DNR - well, Lands and Forests, when I started - and then worked as an extension biologist in Halifax so I was familiar with the head office, if you will, for a number of years. Then I took a job with provincial Fisheries. So some of my understanding here comes as much from my professional background as a biologist and working with the government as it does from my participation with the Federation of Anglers and Hunters.
I will try to keep on track here. It is interesting that the Federation of Anglers and Hunters, for example, - correct me here - they are very strong on clear-cutting and they want it banned, which is much stronger, personally, than I would. So we put forestry down here, or I did, because I feel that there is a very strong sense with the public that there is a lot of over-cutting going on.
The first thing I note in that - I still have friends in DNR, I don't believe in making enemies - but I did want to sort of hit some serious topics here today with you folks - is that Peter MacQuarrie, who is somebody I knew from years ago, I called him up and I had to give a talk to a group a while back and he sent the 1998 data to me about how much is being cut in the province. When we cashed in the budworm years ago, some of you are old enough to probably remember the budworm wood that was around, there was a glut, particularly in Cape Breton, for a time. In the years since then, there has been a real steady demand. This relates to a global picture, not just Nova Scotia. When we have a hurricane in Florida now, we have a plywood price increase. It is a different world that we live in than perhaps when I started work.
In any event, we are concerned. A lot of this cutting is in private woodlots. It is easy to point the fingers at big companies but the reality is a lot of this is coming off - people are cashing in woodlots. It may be going to a company, it usually is, but we are quite concerned about that. When you get people like Dr. G.W.I. Creighton, who was a Deputy Minister for many years in what was then Lands and Forests, stating in 1998 that the Crown lands have been raped, I take some note because that man still has his marbles in place upstairs here. When you get people who are senior like that saying those things, I think we should be listening pretty carefully.
The stumpage rates on Crown land, in a large way, it has been a give-away. I am going to have to skip - and not throw stones - over some issues here that I just feel that as hunters and anglers, we are quite concerned because we are seeing Crown lands essentially being used for industrial purposes. Particularly with this IRM process that is going on right now, there is a sort of a chance, if you will, to take a look at Crown land again in the province. It would appear that the status quo is very much the situation that is happening.
In Muriel's area and the area where I live, which is east of Antigonish, there are really no areas set aside whatsoever and there were a number identified by a number of concerned groups, naturalist groups and whatnot. The federation belongs to 1 of 35 organizations right now that is, in fact, concerned about the use of Crown lands that have joined a coalition about this. We are sort of finding that it is a bit of a brick wall, DNR. We had a meeting with them in
early December and we were going to get some answers by the end of December. It is now February and we haven't had any answers from them. People like Vickie Harnish have jumped ship and that is all understandable but she knew that when she made commitments and other folks should have taken it up. This hasn't happened.
I think that tourism and hunting and fishing are part of a package that there is a lot of potential revenue and a lot of people move to Nova Scotia to live here - forgetting about the tourists - move here for a reason that involves the out of doors and the seashore, a lot of things. The Crown land, for example, along our seashores, a lot of it is not being taken account of in any special way.
You folks have asked for our concerns and I am afraid I am piling them on here. I know a lot of these concerns have easy answers but I do want to address them today because I do think that in some cases we need a fresh approach.
Tony, do you have anything more to say? I guess in the package that we have offered here, I have written, for example, some of the things, I have listened to some of the other, there is a standing committee on economy and there was a fellow who was talking about old growth forest being like a tomato patch and if you don't harvest the tomatoes it will rot and likening this. I was just sort of sitting there saying, wait a minute, when I heard this on the radio because less than 1 per cent of this province is old growth. We don't have to worry about a glut of old growth here. As a scientist, there are some interesting things that happen with the animals that recycle forests.
For example, just to give an example, most of us are familiar with white spruce fields that grow in on the fields. There are a million acres, roughly, in this province, that have grown in since the early 1900's. In a lot of places, those trees will live for 200 or 250 years. In Nova Scotia they start rotting and dying at 70 or 80 years of age. Well, there is a gentleman by the name of Dr. Peter Ogden who worked in the biology department here at Dal years ago and he did some research about phosphates in the soils. Forgetting about the soil animals that tend to disappear when you clear-cut, for example, the phosphates, he found that whenever you took a ton of wood fibre, removed it from the forest as a wood product, that there were about six pounds of phosphates that went with that wood fibre that were, in fact, critical to - that would normally be recycled if the forest had fallen down and would be used again.
I raise this as a question. I don't have all the answers. Anybody who does scares me these days but some of us have looked at some of the elements, as scientists, that might be the cause of why we have the situation we do with some of our forests. I think there is reason for caution here in terms of how much we remove. The idea that a forest can be clear-cut and that the forest that replaces it offers the same thing to wild life, there are animals that can capitalize on clear-cut forests that regenerate and there are other animals that are very much disadvantaged by it.
MR. TONY RODGERS: The position that Bob had mentioned earlier about our position on clear-cutting goes back quite a few years. It was at a time when there was money for plantations and the development of monocultures on those areas that were clear-cut. That was one of the fears as well. It wasn't basically what you took off the land as what you were going to put back on it. Coupled with that was also the use of a lot of chemical spray in the vegetation management of any unwanted species coming up in those same areas. So there were a number of things that were tied together, not just the clear-cutting of the land but the monoculture being planted and the chemicals being used later on so that there was a . . .
MR. BANCROFT: Package deal.
MR. RODGERS: . . . package deal right there. So when we objected to one it was because of all of the other dominoes that were affected in that same picture.
MR. BANCROFT: This is a very large subject but I think in all fairness, Darlene said 15 or 20 minutes. Here we have covered - I will leave the forestry at that and ask if you want to ask questions now, it is up to Jim as the chairman, to decide but we sort of said if you want to go sort of section by section here and anybody has any comments.
MR. CHAIRMAN: I think I tend to agree. We are going through these various sections and perhaps it would be best, while it is still fresh on our minds, to entertain any questions that may come to the floor, not that you can't do that later on as well if something comes to mind. Mrs. Baillie, would you like to start off?
MRS. MURIEL BAILLIE: Speaking about replanting, what is your opinion? They say if you clear-cut, I guess I am asking you, which is better, clear-cut and replant - if you have to clear-cut - or clear-cutting and letting it come up on its own?
MR. RODGERS: The natural regeneration would be fine if all the trees that were growing up were allowed to come up together. What happens in a monoculture, when you start putting in that investment of planting spruce, because that is the product you want to harvest in the future, and then when the spruce are at a certain height, you chemically spray the hardwoods to make sure that they don't compete with the spruce and the nutrients in the soil. That is where the problem begins; the natural regeneration. I was in an area this past weekend doing some snowshoeing and I noticed in this particular cut, it wasn't a large cut but it was a clear-cut, that they did leave a couple of very substantial seed trees right in the middle of where this area was.
That particular patch was going to receive some good seed in the future because of the stock that they left there. It was huge.
MR. BANCROFT: If I could just address that as well, I think there is room for pioneer forests. It used to be that fires ran unfettered through Nova Scotia - in the days before when beavers were the main manipulators of habitat - until they hit the sea. You wound up with pioneer species. When I say pioneer species, I mean the poplar and the wire birch you see around Pictou. There was a history of fire. So that has a place, perhaps, for a lot of the wildlife.
I don't think we want Nova Scotia to be turned into old growth but in some ways, there are options with a lot of the land that I see where people are taking a forest that has good components and which is resilient to insect damage and they are cutting down an ecosystem and they are replacing it with a plantation. Now that is fine if you want to farm trees but you shouldn't pretend that you are maintaining the same sort of system. In the past I think the public had the feeling that you could cut down a tree and if you planted something, then it was all right. That is really not quite necessarily always the case. I think there is a lot more to this story than we can address this morning but that is part of the picture.
MR. CHAIRMAN: We hear - if I might jump in just for a moment - a lot from the naturalist groups and so on about old growth forests in Nova Scotia. In my mind, there are very little old growth forests that are true old growth forests, maybe in some of the deep valleys in Cape Breton. Would that be a fair statement?
MR. BANCROFT: Yes, isolated places and little patches like the Kentville ravine in back of the research station where I used to work, unusual little spots where a private landowner may have just not bothered to cut. That happens, too, there are places like that in Pictou County but it is true . . .
MR. CHAIRMAN: Pictou County is my home turf but it is true that a lot of places that are referred to as old growth forests, indeed are not.
MR. BANCROFT: That is correct.
MR. CHAIRMAN: I recognize John MacDonell and welcome to our committee.
MR. JOHN MACDONELL: Thank you. I apologize for being late. It doesn't necessarily mean I am worth waiting for.
I am interested, Bob, in your comments about Dr. Ogden's research. This is something I have wondered about a lot and have never really pursued it to try to get any information. I do wonder of the effect of harvesting that biomass which, by nature, would fall to the ground and provide organic matter for the next generation.
MR. BANCROFT: That's right.
MR. JOHN MACDONELL: I know from what has been said, the root system on a lot of plants, and I have heard for trees, is basically almost the same mass as what is above the ground. Whether that is true or not, I am not sure.
MR. BANCROFT: In some species.
MR. JOHN MACDONELL: I thought, well if you left the limbs and you left the trunk and the roots and these things in the soil, how much of the actual trunk of a tree could you keep removing before you start to run into problems with lack of nutrients and how do you put that back? I just wonder if you have, either from Dr. Ogden's research or your own thoughts about how to manage a forest and somehow prevent the depletion as much as possible or maintain . . .
MR. BANCROFT: There is some research going on in Germany right now and other places - and I do teach at an eco-forestry school which is apart from anglers and hunters really, in the province - and essentially there are other elements and nutrients that you can actually, by taking off the foliage and leaving the bark, essentially a lot of those nutrients are in that so it can be recycled that way. The question becomes whether the phosphates are in the boughs of the tree that are removed. It is less than clear to me, from reading what Dr. Ogden has said in the past, I am not sure. I am suspicious that actually it is in the fibre, in the case of the phosphates, but in the case of some of the other elements that are important, I know from the research in Germany that, in fact, some of these things you can solve the problem, partly, John, by removing the limbs and leaving them on site.
MR. CHAIRMAN: I think Mr. MacKinnon is next.
MR. RUSSELL MACKINNON: Mr. Chairman, the first question is with regard to - you made reference to the aerial spraying. Can you give us some indication as to what the impact of the aerial spraying has been on Nova Scotia's forests over the last 10 years or so, or 15 or 20 years or even since it started?
MR. RODGERS: That is a pretty broad question because I don't think any research has ever been done on it. The main product that is used here is glysophate and it comes in a couple of different packages, Vision and Roundup are the two that are commonly known and used in the forest. What we are concerned about, and have always been, is the fact that the recipes for these particular products have never been given to the public or government to look at and there are a number of inerts associated with this that we are not sure what exactly is in the product.
That question will always be there, what is out there that may, over time, cause problems in the ecosystem?
MR. MACKINNON: Is that because of the trade secret?
MR. RODGERS: Yes, the trade secret. That is . . .
MR. BANCROFT: The initial ingredient goes out and then it combines with organics and you are not really sure what is happening with some of that. I don't mean to fear-monger but if I could pick up with - the general trend has been that the pulp companies first went into areas where there were softwoods. A lot of the spraying has been for pulp. Then they went into mixed-wood areas and they cut the mixed wood and they wanted to maintain the . . .
MR. MACKINNON: The monoculture.
MR. BANCROFT: . . . convert to softwoods. That is the whole idea. So the general trend, if I could pick up on what Tony is saying, has been to convert the province from mixed-wood stands to softwood stands. It has only been partly successful and in all fairness to the people who are doing it, it retards the growth of the hardwoods to give the softwoods a chance to dominate. It doesn't get rid of them entirely but the whole scenario of clear-cut and then site prepare and plant and then herbicide was a very costly thing for the taxpayers of this province, when, in fact, if one had gone in and not clear-cut but used other alternatives and then established natural regeneration, then you wouldn't have had to pay for site preparation, you wouldn't have had to pay for the chemicals that were used and the planting costs. The folks who clear-cut didn't have to pay for those things, they just cashed in their wood. It is a different economic scenario here and when you look at real costs, which is what some of the communities, people who are concerned about the forest, are looking at the total cost of everything, then it becomes a less clear financial picture.
MR. RODGERS: If I could just pick up on that. This may sound a little off the beaten path but it will give you an idea, this past Sunday and the Sunday before last, with a few friends I went down to Musquodoboit to try to get some smelts into a bucket and unfortunately had absolutely no luck. One of the locals said, well, the problem is all the eel grass is gone out of the harbour. He said, we think it is those sod farms. I said, wait a second, we have taken an awful lot of jumps here but basically what they were saying was the amount of chemicals that were being used in the agriculture industry further up river in Musquodoboit was causing a problem in the harbour. Now that wasn't scientific at all. That was just a guess and an assumption and maybe a prejudicial one at that, but it will give you a feel for what some of the people in the public are thinking when it comes to the relationship between the chemical use on the land and what may be happening in the ecosystem and even in the water close to the land - but none of us caught smelts.
MR. MACKINNON: Would it be fair to say, then, that we have lost some wildlife species because of this forestry activity, the spray?
MR. BANCROFT: We have shifted the balance, largely, and a lot of the species that have done well - moose, deer - have done well in plantations and cutovers. Let's be fair here, but there are other species, old growth forest species, if you will . . .
MR. RODGERS: Pine martens . . .
MR. BANCROFT: Pine martens and other things, and certain owl species, cavity users; we have four species of ducks that nest in holes in trees. In my time, I found them in chimneys nesting because they can't find a hole in a tree somewhere. So we have shifted things but it is very difficult.
With all the budworm spraying that went on with toxic nerve poisons in New Brunswick, the scientists, you could not say they were eliminating species, there were no longer species where they were spraying, but they didn't spray the whole province every year and we don't clear-cut this whole province every year, so you have to be careful how you cloister your comments here. I don't mean to start sounding like a politician - you are supposed to be the politicians - but you can get cornered into saying something that is basically too absolute here.
What we have done is we have favoured and disfavoured animals; you really cannot say that we have eliminated too many. The ones that are extinct, there may have been grey auks or things like that down along the coast here. The Acadian whitefish is a good example. It is only endemic to Nova Scotia. Acid rain from a large part of continental North America is landing here; dams have affected it, introductions of introduced fish that don't really belong here have affected its life and it may be becoming extinct and it is in part because of indirect human activity.
MR. MACKINNON: I have one more question on that point, if I could, Mr. Chairman. Your opening line there, you made reference to forestry over-cutting on private woodlots and Crown land. In 1998 alone, it was almost 12.9 million cords. Do you feel that maybe we have come to the point of where the rate of cutting is starting to exceed the rate of regeneration?
MR. RODGERS: I think so.
MR. MACKINNON: Do you have anything to back that up?
MR. RODGERS: No, unfortunately. We don't have the financial resources to do that sort of backing up. What we do have is the human-on-the-ground resources that are relating the information back to us.
MR. BANCROFT: This is a lot like an agricultural question, because if you eliminate all of the competition and just grow softwood fibre on a site, like a cornfield, you are eliminating everything else and putting all the energy into one thing. Some of the people who have worked in forestry in the past for DNR - Lands and Forests - were very good at saying, if we do silviculture work and put this money in here, then we can grow three times the amount of trees. So there would probably be foresters who would come forward right now in this
province and say that if given enough of a budget, I could produce enough trees to sustain this. But then the question becomes, what's left for the wildlife and the fish, and some of the other things that some of us are concerned about?
MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Chipman is next.
MR. FRANK CHIPMAN: I spoke with a gentleman the other night - I won't reveal his name, of course - a major sawmill operator and he made the statement that there is more wood in the province and trees are growing faster than we cut them. I don't agree with that. I think back a few years ago and there was a Royal Commission on Forestry trying to determine which was the best way to go. You mentioned private land and corporation land - I think 20-some per cent of this province is owned by the province and the other 80 per cent by the private sector. This Royal Commission, if I remember correctly, was going to give the large corporations the authority to go on private land and manage. To me, that would have been disastrous. Maybe that's why they brought gun control in, Tony, I don't know. (Laughter) I guess my feeling is that if the large companies can't manage their own land, why do they need more of the private land?
I guess I look at areas in my county. I don't know if you are familiar with Joe Symons in the Sucker Lake, New Albany area, but we met with one of the timber companies here a few months ago and they have cut right to the shore of the lake. I can remember going there 30 or 40 years ago with my father and that was probably one of the best fishing lakes in Annapolis County. You had to have an old jeep and it took us an hour to get there; now you are in there with a car in 15 minutes. There are no fish in that lake anymore because they have cut right to the shore of the lake. Of course, when I questioned the company, they said it was because the contractor did it, not the company. We have forest guidelines in the province, but that is all they are and there is no penalty for cutting to the shore of the lake and nothing to protect it.
You are involved in this more than I was, Tony, but I am under the understanding that when you clear-cut, a lot of your springs in the forests to feed the lakes, where your cold water really comes from, is affected because when you clear-cut, it warms the water and you don't have that cold water for the fish to survive. That's the first question I would like to ask, Mr. Chairman.
[9:30 a.m.]
MR. BANCROFT: Basically, I would have liked to have brought a slide show today because I do a slide show on land use and what's happened to rivers. I have written an article, and Darlene Henry has been kind enough to reproduce a number of them in here. There is one on wilderness access, which relates to what you said about the lake, but there is one in here called Cry Me a River - it is out of Saltscapes magazine, which is a good Nova Scotian publication - and it is a read that may take you half an hour or 20 minutes.
Nova Scotia is not the only place where this has happened. When I go to Europe, I see ditches to the sea and the flush rates have changed, and you have a sense of this, without being a scientist, that something has happened to our rivers. They are polluted; they are overtaxed in some cases, like the Cornwallis, for agriculture; the number of leases, or water rights, things that are going on there, there are all sorts of problems. The first thing we do is cut the banks and the tree roots. There used to be massive tree roots. I have been up to the north part of Cape Breton and four of us had to join arms to get around trees that were on the interval there that used to hold the bank in place. It's not us that did this, you would have to be 300 years old to see the results of all this.
I would really ask, if we don't have time to cover the whole subject today because of constraints - although I could address this in great detail if you wish - if you read that article that Darlene has copied from the magazine here, it received a lot of good reviews and it is a summation of what I have written for the Atlantic Salmon Journal, which is a series called Fixing Broken Rivers, because we really have broken our rivers in this province. Other places have as well. What they do now is they are shallow in the summer and they have very little water, they are much wider than they should be. Basically, when you cut the forest and clear the land on a flood plain - and I am going to get to some of this later on, on policy, if we don't run out of time.
What has happened is, I have worked for a government department that was trying to restore rivers and streams and fish habitat; at the same time other government departments, within the same government, were subsidizing people to destroy fish habitat by draining, adding pipes. No wonder the public of Nova Scotia, the farmers, get confused, when you have people like me showing up with a Land and Sea crew saying, you are plowing right down to the river's edge and you are polluting and you are adding silt and all of this stuff to the river. The Agriculture guidelines say to stay back 50 feet, they ignore them, and the taxpayers' dollars are paying the farmer to do this. Then somebody like me comes along and says, this is insane from an ecological perspective and it's terrible.
This is one of the reasons I left government one year ago, as soon as I had the first chance; there is such a dichotomy. It's not deliberate, but when I tried to pull it together, to get different government departments together - and again, this impinges less on the anglers and hunters, although that may be partly why I was elected president, I'm not sure, but there is a real two-sidedness to this and a lot of confusion.
MR. RODGERS: There is some opportunity though. You mentioned the guidelines; in Dr. Hamm's blue book, that was one of the things that he had made as a promise, that the forestry and wildlife guidelines would be made into regulations. We still look forward to that too. That would give them some teeth and an opportunity to really strengthen those particular ideas.
MR. CHIPMAN: You have a good point there, Bob. I was at a meeting over the weekend and somebody mentioned the fact that if they wanted to go back five miles in the woods and build a camp, or live, that the regulations there require an on-site sewage disposal and drinking water, yet the City of Halifax flushes everything into the harbour.
One thing that has always been a concern of mine, the Annapolis River flows from Kings County down through Annapolis County into the Annapolis Basin, but if you look, the towns and villages are all centred along that route. I don't know if all of them do but I would say most of their sewage goes through a sewage treatment plant and the residue goes into the Annapolis River and flushes its way down to the Nictaux River, which goes into the Annapolis River which was once, I think probably one of the best salmon fishing rivers in the world. The fault of that now, of course, they claim, is the Nova Scotia Power dam on the Nictaux River. In Annapolis County, I think it's the Annapolis Valley Fly Fishermen's Association - I don't know if you are aware of them - put a fish ladder in there in conjunction with Nova Scotia hydro here two or three years ago. How do you change this?
The Town of Annapolis Royal is working with Ducks Unlimited; they are going to have a wetlands for their sewer now and there has been some opposition to it, but it may be the way of the future. I know there are different species of wood that will absorb trace metals.
MR. BANCROFT: It is an education challenge, as well as a reality learning process. To get back to what you initially said, DNR says the over-cutting - they are admitting over-cutting, at least they did to me on the phone - is on private woodlots. There are about 30,000 private woodlots that represent about half the small private and 20 per cent of the land base is in reality large companies, Kimberly-Clark and Bowater, people like that; 50 per cent of it is about 30,000 small-woodlot owners. This is just on a forested land base, so that's a lot of people. So I think you have to be careful here when you start pointing fingers. DNR is saying this and I am agreeing with them but from what I see in Pictou County, for example, there is just a host of cutting going on and it is largely on private land yet there is no law, and common sense says there should be. I have actually had pulp cutters call me and say I'm suggesting that I don't cut down to the edge of the brook and they are saying, oh no, cut it. There is an education thing here that we need.
As a biologist, I was thrown out of public meetings when we tried years ago to put in a forest improvement Act in this province which would have, in fact, created special zones. It isn't that you can't cut near a stream or river, you just have to be more careful about how you cut. Clear-cutting is definitely not a good thing. Common sense here can go a long way.
Our education system is amazing; we spend all this money and you have not really educated people. I'm supposed to be an adjunct professor at a university and I am dealing with third year biology students who don't, for example, understand the difference between a spruce tree and a fir tree. How can you get that far along in your education? I wouldn't hire them. I could give them a compass and they would be gone, you wouldn't have to worry about them anymore. (Laughter)
MR. CHAIRMAN: John MacDonell.
MR. JOHN MACDONELL: Thank you. I will tell you this little anecdote, which I think will come to your point, Bob. A number of years ago I used to help a local small farmer, a hobby farmer. He would go around to the various exhibitions and Scott Paper used to have a display of cross-sections of trees, plus a piece of this trunk. You had to identify them and they would have a prize. It got to the point where they wouldn't let him enter the contest and one time they tried to fool him with a piece of apple tree and he didn't get fooled.
I was a biology teacher for a number of years, so I used to think about that and the fact that so many of our students today - like, I have a rural constituency, for the most part, and even in Milford, which is a large dairy farming area, there are subdivisions where people go to the local store to buy their milk and eggs and have no real connection to the farming or the woods or anything. I used to think, gee, there is a generation of children growing up - who don't have the experience that that individual had, because what he learned about the trees he learned in the woods with his parents or whoever. So, I had a project where they had to identify 27 native trees in Nova Scotia and give me the common name, the scientific name, and this was for a Grade 10 biology course. You talk about causing a fluster for a lot of people. I said, go with your grandfather, take a walk; don't get too bent out of shape about this, but see what you can learn.
It did work, I think, for the first year or two, but it got to the point where actually people just didn't do it, even for the value I put on it that they would lose. I really worried about the fact that students don't have a lot of knowledge about what's around them. That's just a simple, basic taxonomy to learn those species in Nova Scotia.
One thing I am concerned about that you have mentioned, is the idea of clear-cutting. At the Nova Scotia Forest Products Association meeting a couple of weeks ago, I was there and I spoke to the Deputy Minister of Natural Resources. He talked about the over-cutting on private woodlots, and I think people should understand that the reason we are over-cutting them is because you can sell it. He led me to believe that the department was not really interested in stepping in in this regard, that they wanted to see the money go into silviculture, to help compensate for the cutting and that it was going to be market-driven. I said, well, if we woke up tomorrow morning and every tree in Nova Scotia was cut, it wouldn't matter how much silviculture you did, you wouldn't have any trees for a while. He said, well, you know, the trees we are cutting now are from the silviculture we did 20 years ago. And I never thought to tell him, but I'll bet you aren't cutting the clear-cuts from 20 years ago.
To me, if you are going to cut trees - and it's not like the codfish, you can actually go out and count these trees, they don't move away; you can get a pretty good accurate picture of what you are cutting. It would seem to me that if you are going to allow this to go on - that you should be able to figure out that we can only cut so much a year at this rate and it will last x number of years. So if we want to go on sustainably forever, we have to put a limit. Now, maybe they are right that you can increase the volume three times by doing silviculture, but that won't happen tomorrow, that's going to take some time. I think until we impose an annual allowable cut, I think the whole basis of sustainability flies out the window because as soon as the market drives the demand, you can go above the point that you can sustain if you don't put a limit on what you are going to cut.
A year and one-half ago, it slowed - you know, the industry has slowed recently - I think mostly due to wood from other parts of the country that have gone into the American market and an increase of 1 per cent would probably annihilate what Nova Scotia's effect would be on the U.S. market.
I know of local mills in my area that bid $2,000 an acre for timber and couldn't get it. It's pretty hard not to tell someone, if somebody offers you that, they are probably going to sell their wood and that was driving a whole lot of this over-cutting on private woodlots. So until we actually say we can only cut this much in Nova Scotia and then come up with a formula or a mechanism for how that was going to be done, I don't think there is any real security for forests here and I think any cutting that's done is going to have to be done more on a treatment basis. Clear-cutting should really be a treatment if you have to do it and in the whole province, surely, it wouldn't seem that clear-cutting would be the only treatment you could do?
MR. BANCROFT: There are lots of other economical options in the long run, if you look at the whole picture of costs associated with producing trees, that's right, and there is a lot better tree production. Two things, just quickly. The Forestry Stewardship Council is the environmental way of certifying forests. There are people in Europe right now - a growing number of folks, including some businesses in Nova Scotia - who want to know that a wood product comes from a reasonable forest operation, not a rape scene, excuse my language.
I'm an assessor for a group that does that now and there are forests and there is a whole line of reasoning here that you can produce an oak tree - if you look at the price of things, pulpwood is not the way to make money. Some of the operations I have seen, when I went up to Ontario to take this assessor's course for the smart wood, a skidder would go by with four logs and one of them was this cherry log that was veneer and it was $600. That's how the woodlot owner was making money, not just by moving tons of material. That's where the industry could be changing here. There are woodlot owners that are doing - and I am involved with what they call restoration forestry on sites where you want to bring the oak trees back, the pine trees back, some of the things that were here beforehand, not just the poplar and the sort of waste trees, if you will.
MR. RODGERS: Technology has caught up with this industry too.
MR. CHAIRMAN: I am just wondering, now we have several topics to cover and I would suggest we could move into perhaps agriculture now and if we have time later on further questions on forestry, we can do so.
MR. BANCROFT: Tony, why don't you say a few words on poaching. Oh, I am sorry, not poaching, game farming.
MR. RODGERS: Game farming exists in Nova Scotia. That is the raising of animals in pens. Usually these are species that normally didn't exist in farmed situations before. The federation has objected to it from the outset because of the potential for disease, the potential for poaching of wild animals to be brought into that same market, deer meat for instance, and antlers that are used in Asian aphrodisiac markets. We have it at a situation in Nova Scotia right now that I think there are about seven to nine farms that still exist. We have been proven right. There hasn't been much of a market for these animals. They are subsistence but that is about it.
The situation is taking hold in Western Canada now. Bob mentioned it in his notes about the chronic wasting disease in the elk herds out there. The government is now reaching into their bank accounts to compensate farmers who are losing these elk and it is all diseases that they were warned about. This is what is going to happen when you husband animals that are normally wild. Also, a lot of these elk have been proven to be stolen seed stock out of the United States, so there was a poaching element involved with the beginning of these operations and so on.
The reason I wanted this on the list today is just to put this group on notice that it is something they should pay careful attention to and watch what is happening in other parts of Canada. I understand that Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Alberta are actually moving toward legislation that would stop the practice. So if we could pay attention to that, that is all I am interested in right now. Thank you.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Frank, I think, had a question for you, Tony.
MR. CHIPMAN: Yes, we are talking about game. There is a gentleman in my area who introduced some wild turkeys a few years back and there was some discussion in the paper about it that they were going to destroy the flock but I understand they are still roaming around. Do you see any problem with it. What's the reason?
MR. RODGERS: It is ironic but we have a position of introduction of wild turkeys, it is about 10 or 12 years on our books. The problem with the introduction of wild turkey is because of the actual species itself. It is a very wary bird and one that shuns contact with man probably greater than any other of the game species that are around but the introductions that have taken place in Nova Scotia have been illegal ones where animals have been released that were in captivity. They only call them wild because they are brown in colour. A commercial turkey has primarily got white feathers and these ones with the big fans and plumes are brown in colour and have a little bit more to them.
MR. CHIPMAN: These are black.
MR. RODGERS: These are black, well, yes,
MR. CHIPMAN: They are huge.
MR. RODGERS: Yes, big birds.
MR. BANCROFT: They are not necessarily the best stock. That is one of the things, Frank.
MR. CHIPMAN: They survive, though, year after year in the wild.
MR. BANCROFT: As a matter of fact, the federation even paid Paul Tufts, when he was a biologist working for what is now DNR, to go down to Maine and take a look at some of this. Tony, I kind of cut in on you.
MR. RODGERS: No, that is okay. That is right. We did pay a lot of money. As a matter of fact, one of our clubs, the Digby East Fish and Game, is still willing to pay for a legitimate introduction. The problem, we understand from the Department of Natural Resources' biologists, is that if you start mixing these two groups of animals together, you could actually diminish your introduction. In just the past month, ironically you should bring this up, the Wild Turkey Association, one of its members was recently transferred into Nova Scotia with the RCMP and has been making contact with us to see what they can do in pushing this along. The habitat down through the Annapolis Valley has been identified as good turkey habitat. The trouble is that they may out-compete existing species such as pheasants for existing mass crop. There is still work to be done here.
MR. BANCROFT: The other thing is disease, if I could. In the past, for example, short-tail grouse introductions have brought an eye parasite that could be transferred to partridge or ruff grouses, as most people call them. When the white-tailed deer were brought into Nova Scotia, it brought a brain worm that affects moose. There are reasons why biologists are a little cautious about these things, perhaps too cautious some might say.
MR. CHIPMAN: What about the wild boar? Do you want to discuss that one?
MR. RODGERS: That, again, is another game farmed animal that we wouldn't like to see here. The problem too, that is associated with this, is the embarrassment factor to the hunting community. In that particular instance I think the one you are referring to is in the Great Village area. These animals are no more wild than the cup in front of me. They are very tame and for somebody to want to harvest one of those animals with a bow and arrow or firearm would be an embarrassment to the hunting community. There is no fair chase involved here. The use of the word wild, the use of the word hunt, are just abhorrent to any of us who take our chances in the wild. We just can't support anything of that nature when it comes about.
MR. CHIPMAN: So they are more or less like a domestic hog.
MR. RODGERS: They are. As a matter of fact, I think there is proof being done now by DNR. There are supposed to be some blood samples taken from these animals and the proof will be that they are really a domesticated animal that happened to be, the same as the turkey, a little brown in colour and therefore they fit into what somebody might want to call wild.
MR. CHIPMAN: I was thinking of the island off of Yarmouth. I think that was a different species.
MR. BANCROFT: That has been there for a long time.
MR. RODGERS: They were actual wild boars, weren't they, with tusks.
MR. BANCROFT: That was before we were taking interest in any of this sort of activity. We would be hard-pressed to go back and go through that history. It is isolated, as you mentioned, on an island, but I think some of the negative things that could happen to a piece of land because of one of these animals being in the wild, are evident down there too so it might be worth visiting.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you. Moving along now. That was three questions right there. Jon Carey.
MR. JON CAREY: In my area, there are a lot of orchards and the trend has been to cut the old trees and replant with dwarf or mini-dwarf to get better production and so on but the deer population is very destructive to the new trees. Now the buck law appears to have allowed the population to increase, particularly in Kings County, anyway. I am just wondering if there has been any correspondence? The farmers have no way to protect their investment and I was wondering if there was any correspondence between your organizations and the farming community where there might be bow hunting or something, I don't know what, because it is becoming a financial burden to many farmers.
MR. RODGERS: We have tried to introduce that sort of thinking, not just for the apples but any of the fruit growers, the blueberry association and so on. We have offered our services and also through the Department of Natural Resources. What we have suggested is that in areas where a farmer is having particular concerns, particular problems, to ask a hunter or a group of them to come in and hunt that particular piece of land to try to remove those particular animals. We are not talking about extra tags, we are talking about the hunter who fills his tag on that particular farm, that is the end of his hunt. You may want to bring him earlier than what the conventional season is. You may want to bring him in in August when the fruit is at its best, to remove them that way. Yes, we have put forward those types of suggestions to the Fruit Growers Association, the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Natural Resources. Also, in dealing with coyote predation on sheep and other livestock, we have also made that same suggestion. It is sad to say, we have yet to be taken up on it but it is out there.
MR. BANCROFT: If I could just add to what Tony said. I do think that there are things farmers can do and every situation is a little different. I have a bit of an orchard and I would be the first to admit that I have had problems with deer. In fact, when my wife and I went out this spring to plant, within an hour we had the deer out chewing on what we had just planted. In the past, for example, there are techniques I have used with high voltage fencing where you just run a strand at about 18 inches through the grass, around the perimeter and they wander into it without really realizing what is there. If you put a complete fence clear around the area, they would jump it unless it was eight feet high and had all kinds of things. There are ways and I think when it comes to agriculture I have a lot of problems with what is going on but farmers need help with some of these things.
In the past, I know at DNR, when I was a biologist, we used to spend a lot time trying to work with farmers to come up with a package that would, in fact, help them. We had folks that were gut shooting does so they would run off in the woods in a blueberry field. Essentially, when they made the blueberry field they got subsidized to do it and they should have known they were going to have deer problems because it is on an interval and a beautiful part of the St. Mary's River and the deer think it is their land too.
MR. RODGERS: We had a similar situation that Bob was talking about, in the Parrsboro area during the height of when the deer herds were in very good shape, of 173 deer carcasses in the dump in Parrsboro. Now we just find this unacceptable and said so at the time. If that is the case, then increase the bag limit on these animals to help reduce the numbers. Don't just shoot them and take them off the field.
What Bob means by a gut-shot deer is that if you were to a kill an animal in the heart/lung area, it would drop right there but they didn't want the animals to fall on the blueberry crop so they would shoot it in the lower part of the body, the stomach, and that would cause them to run into the woods and die away. It was also a longer, slower death.
MR. BANCROFT: A painful, horrible death.
MR. RODGERS: So there are a number of problems but again all associated with one thing and that is we share the habitat with these animals and there are other things to do than just . . .
MR. CAREY: I guess the last part would be, is there any ongoing correspondence or communication so that this, the limits and so on, can be looked at? I guess my question is, do you people have input to Natural Resources and are they listening?
MR. BANCROFT: We have good relationships, and it is listed down here further, Jon, with the wildlife division biology staff in that regard. It is also an enforcement issue.
MR. RODGERS: And we have good relations with the enforcing staff. In fact, we came to their side not too long ago when it became an issue as to where the enforcement staff was going to reside in this province. The issues of getting things changed are largely up to politicians and people above.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Just on the deer population. It seems to be quite high in the Pictou County area that I represent, down to your boundary, Bob.
MR. RODGERS: It is.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Given the number of accidents that occur with motor vehicles and deer, I am wondering if all this snow is going to have a natural effect on that and to what extent? Are some dying off, the weak ones dying off now as a result of having a hard time getting food?
MR. RODGERS: If this stays for another couple of months, right now it hasn't happened for that long and the deer have been moving, at least in my area. I live on a shore so one has to be careful about inland here but a lot of the deer move off the high ground and into the river valleys for the winter. My feeling is that if this continues and if we get a crust that the coyotes can run on, for example, where the deer are breaking through and coyotes are on top, that is when there are going to be a lot of deer starting to die. But in Pictou County it appears
to be, at this point in the game, the deer are still able to travel and to some extent they are prepared and able to survive over a period where they have some restricted access.
MR. CHAIRMAN: But it still is quite high, the population?
MR. BANCROFT: Except for Cape Breton. There are not that many deer in Cape Breton yet.
MR. RODGERS: In around Chignecto and that particular point of land out there but the rest of it is in excellent shape and the reports from the past hunting season have been very encouraging that the herd was in very good shape. The fat reserves of these animals, again over the summer and the fall, are sufficient to take them through a normal winter. It is when, as Bob mentioned, you stated abnormal snow depths for a long period of time and then you have a predator that is fairly new to the province, given the history of the land, that can cause them some grief, you could reduce that number. The winter mortality is just part of nature and hopefully it is not that great and that there is some recovery in the spring.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you. Now, John MacDonell, did you still have a quick question?
[10:00 a.m.]
MR. JOHN MACDONELL: I have a quick question. A couple of things. One is, there is a domestic turkey called the broad-breasted bronze which is basically a black turkey. It is from a wild stock that is one of three subspecies in the western part of the southern United States. Now the Mariam and the Rio Grande are two of those subspecies. Actually, I think that was a domesticated turkey that the Indians domesticated, actually. The eastern North American turkey that we think about, the Quakers shooting for Thanksgiving, never was a domesticated turkey. I heard about a subspecies in Michigan and other areas that are fairly similar to that East Coast one, I am not positive. So I think if anybody is thinking about an introduction of turkeys, probably to try to get a pure subspecies would be maybe complicated.
MR. RODGERS: That was the information that we were given, actually.
MR. JOHN MACDONELL: The other thing I do want to mention is, I have a flock of Giant Canadas, Branta canadensis maxima, which is a western subspecies. You can only keep those under permit from the Canadian Wildlife Service, agriculture permit. Now this, for the most part, I like to sell enough of them to pay the feed bill, if I can, but the restrictions on those are that you can't kill them and sell them. They have to be sold as live birds only to other permit holders. I certainly would like, in any of these considerations, to think about either regulations that make it fairly difficult to allow large numbers or to keep some measure of control. I, personally, would hate to see someone say we don't want you keeping those wild species of water fowl and things like that.
MR. RODGERS: Depending on what you want to use them for though, John. If it was a large commercial operation, I think we would be bumping heads.
MR. JOHN MACDONELL: Sure.
MR. RODGERS: To have a few for your own personal use and, like you say, pay the feed bill, I don't think there would be a lot of opposition on it.
MR. JOHN MACDONELL: Yes, and these are just sold alive.
MR. RODGERS: To deal with the Act that regulates you, the Migratory Bird Act, you will have some challenges ahead if you want to start moving that particular piece of legislation and getting changes to the rules in it. It is quite difficult.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Frank Chipman, very quick.
MR. CHIPMAN: Just a statement. My colleague, the member for Kings West, was mentioning the fact about deer and orchards. I think what he was implying is the twig damage - my past profession was growing apples - on young trees. Once they get beyond a certain stage it is no problem. It is not the apples that they eat but you will get a few deer that will go in and destroy the trees, marauding deer. The problem I had, we used to be able to get a permit and now, of course, the DNR is not very susceptible to giving permits. My feeling is, and I think you would agree, the resource itself, the deer, belong to the Crown, so if those deer are on my property and doing damage, then I feel, as a farmer, somebody should pay some compensation because in my situation, I had six or seven blocks of orchard and I was prohibited financially to ever fence them to keep the deer out.
MR. RODGERS: I think what it was was such a loose definition of what a nuisance wildlife was. If a person had a row of carrots and was using that row of carrots as an opportunity to shoot what deer were coming into the garden, that is where the problem and the permits were just so readily available. We asked them to tighten up the process. Unfortunately, I think they tightened up a little bit too much but certainly they are looking at doing something in Lunenburg County, First Peninsula and Second Peninsula because I guess down there the deer have basically taken over like squirrels in an attic. They just have taken over the whole area and they are trying to find some way of opening up some sort of a limited hunt to reduce the number of those animals.
MR. BANCROFT: It is very difficult from a management perspective. A lot of our forefathers came from the old country where hunting and fishing was an elite sort of thing that only a privileged few were able to do and when we got over here we wound up on private land with animals that range all over the place. The situation has been solved in other places by allowing the wildlife to become part of the landowners thing. Like in Sweden, you own the trees, you own the land and you have a permit that you can sell so many moose. There is a natural reluctance here to switch to a system where people with money are the ones who do the hunting
and a lot of hunters and fishermen treasure the idea of being able to go out and do this without spending large quantities of money.
You just hit the nail right on the head about the problem. In my case, I solved it with one strand and a galvanometer, running it around. Now mind you, I wasn't a commercial operation, I wouldn't pretend to be. The ongoing thing here is to work with biologists, hunters and farmers together and try to come up with means to minimize the damage.
MR. CHIPMAN: I am not trying to promote anybody but the little small bars of LUX soap, I always found if I could break them in two, tie them with a string to a tree, the scent was the best.
MR. BANCROFT: Yes, it would work for a while.
MR. CHIPMAN: If you are going to put a galvanometer fence up and as best, like the ones they will show you are seven foot high, a deer still can jump over a seven foot high fence but if you can remove and put two fences here and here, the deer can't jump from here over the second one so if you space them apart, that has been more successful but nobody is utilizing it.
MR. BANCROFT: I used one strand and I managed.
MR. CHIPMAN: Is that right?
MR. BANCROFT: Yes, but it is tricky and you can't be 100 per cent. It just minimizes the damage.
MR. CHAIRMAN: I will ask one quick question and then ask you to move on. I guess you realize that you generated a lot of interest around this table and I certainly appreciate that. My question is in regard to bear hunting and whether or not you feel that we should have a seasonal bear hunt?
MR. BANCROFT: We do have a seasonal bear hunt in the fall now and a trapping, snaring season. In other places like Ontario, there was historically a spring bear hunt and that just not too long ago wound up being cut. There is still a kerfuffle going on about it.
MR. RODGERS: In Nova Scotia we had asked for a spring bear hunt. Our neighbouring province, New Brunswick, has one. All the hunters here in Nova Scotia all gather up their money and drive up to New Brunswick and they are going to hunt, it is just they are not going to be doing it at home so they go up there and spend their time. They enjoy themselves and New Brunswick has a good bear population that can sustain this.
We have gone to the biologists in Nova Scotia and asked, is a spring hunt sustainable? We are told yes, it is. But it is a political decision on whether it is going to happen or not. The last time there were a lot of letters written out of Ontario to stop it and that is what happened. In Ontario today, it was a political decision to end the spring bear hunt and our sister
organization up there, the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters, has taken the government to court over this. I just showed Bob some correspondence that I received in today's mail that now Premier Harris and the Minister of Natural Resources will have to testify as to why they made that particular decision. There was a lot of money involved and some work behind the scenes to get this changed.
This was huge decision in Ontario affecting thousands and thousands of people and many dollars involved in that particular hunt. It didn't do a thing to the hunter. The hunters from the United States just went to Manitoba or they went to Quebec. Just Ontario lost the money and the opportunity to not just have them there for that one hunt because it has been proven many times that when a hunter comes in, sees the beauty of the land and the area that he is in, he comes back in the summertime and brings his family with him and they spend more money on a different type of recreation. So there are some losses there.
Do we support a spring bear hunt? Yes, we do and we will continue to support the fall hunt because there is a sustainable population. The number of - what are they called? - nuisance wildlife reports has increased with bears as being part of that nuisance, getting into the green buckets and coming around people's homes and things of this nature.
If I can just, for a moment, bears are territorial and when the population increases and one bear wants to share another bear's territory, it doesn't work that way. He is moved along. The younger bear is moved along and he is going to go someplace and that is when you start hearing about the problems, generally in the spring.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you.
MR. BANCROFT: Clear-cutting will displace bears too and you want to avoid a lot of bears in one small area because there is still a forest left. I just had to deal with that with a Mi'kmaq situation not too long ago.
I guess we are in Agriculture. I just want to quickly say what I identified before, I would reference it. If you don't read anything else in here on the wilderness access problems, I want you to read the Cry Me a River thing because we have abused the land here in ways that have made rivers rather poor, rather sick and broken. I think we should be trying to restore habitat, and agriculture has played a large part in this loss and so has forestry and other land-clearing practices. We are not unique, as a province, in this. I am a Nova Scotian, but we are all part of the problem. We are here. We have inherited it to a large extent but I do look forward to the day when government will be consistent.
Maybe I should skip, I think maybe I will keep this here but I do feel that on the back side, on the second page here, what has happened here, in my view as a biologist, having been here for three years and worked for 27 years for the province, with the utmost respect, I feel that the mandates of the government - agriculture, forestry - tend to be very resource- sector oriented. It amounts to government departments being operated to service the sector.
When I was working in wildlife, it was a forestry operation. Most of the phone calls were wildlife but it was a forestry operation and that is where the money was. The policies reflect that interest and are there to facilitate development in that sector. It isn't based on anything ecological or sustainable or anything like that. I could liken it to silos where you have senior people up on top, politicians, senior advisors and policy makers. Then you have a whole series of folks in between - largely yuppies - who didn't have any place to go so you establish this hierarchy between the people at the bottom who deal with the public and any signal that really starts up here gets buffered until the whole silo hits the ground in one place. You have this for agriculture, you have this for forestry and you have this for a lot of the other resource-based things, whether it is mining or whatever.
When I was in government, I tried to suggest at an intergovernmental committee meeting years ago, and I showed slides, a 45 minute slide show, of what was going on in this province and people just erupted who were normally pleasant folks, senior policy people in DNR, for example, who told me that my slides were out of date and all this sort of thing, that forestry practices like this didn't happen anymore. That is why I have written that rather nasty little thing down here about senior policy folks who have become power brokers and ivory tower frogs who don't really understand what is going on and they are interested in keeping their own puddle.
In reality, we are all in this province together and I don't mean to be nasty but I do mean to make the point here that we have to get together and stop being big frogs in little puddles. From a point a view of what is sustainable, the word is so misused. I just say in here, and what I have written, and I don't want to go on too long here, but - oh, where did I say it? I have lost my point here - we have tended to have an overall policy that is ecologically- based development guidelines instead of a host of conflicting policies designed to make the development impetus sustainable. I hope you understand what I am getting at there. People want development, people want this, people want movement but we are doing it almost at an ecological cost that doesn't always show up. Clear-cuttings are a really good example of that where people get cash for what comes off the land and about what is left and the downgrading of what the land can do.
There was a mile thick ice sheet about 11,000 or 12,000 years ago. We are not Georgia where there has been a land nutrient bank that has gone on for millenniums really. We are relatively recent in our soil growth and in our nutrients and everything and you don't need a lesson on all that right now but I don't think government has come to grips with this very well in terms of people who are interested in the environment are perceived to, in a lot of cases, not have a real grip.
I am a former businessman; when I was a student at Acadia, I had seven employees and then I got into government. I am beginning to wonder how the government ran at all. In the long run, if we do proper accounting here, I think we can have farming, we can have forestry, we can have all these things but we have to start being a little more careful about how we do it. If we want fisheries and if we want wildlife on private land, which is 70-some-odd per cent of the land base in this province, which is critical. P.E.I. is the only other one and they are 90-some-odd per cent private. So there are some very dicey negotiating things that need to be done there.
I have had my little rant and I thank you for letting me go. I realize that I may have insulted some of you but there are policy conflicts that need to be worked out. I didn't have any luck as a biologist. I was on the front lines on the ground level. I didn't have any luck trying to deal with this. I would be the first to admit that there are a lot of problems and it is not easy to address but I think government needs to address them, get together. Thank you for letting me say that.
Agriculture just keeps coming to mind because of what has happened to our rivers. If you read that thing and you have any problems, get a hold of me if you don't understand what I am saying in this article, Cry Me a River. Historically, there have been a lot of habitat losses, saltmarshes and wetland drainage is still going on. There is still a Marshlands Reclamation Act. I have had folks come to me when I have tried to deal with this on an intergovernmental basis and say that there are only six farms in the Musquodoboit Valley. When somebody from the Department of Agriculture says something like that to you, you know it is bullshit so you just back off which is what I was supposed to do. As a minor civil servant, that is what you had to do.
Perhaps we should get on to Wildlife and Inland Fisheries.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. MacKinnon, did you have a question in regard to the previous statement?
MR. MACKINNON: Which one? Some of them were most intriguing, I must say. It goes back to the point that my colleague, the member for Annapolis, raised with regard to government policy in the private sector. I agree with him. It is very difficult for the private sector to accept government intervention when government themselves can't get their act together. I think a classic example of that was this draft policy that was almost adopted to regulate the private sector, as you may or may not remember, when the honourable Charles MacNeil was the Minister of Natural Resources and he tried to put that management plan in place for the private sector. I think we went through, what, eight different drafts before finally the town hall meetings chased him out of the province.
MR. BANCROFT: I got thrown out of one of those meetings.
MR. MACKINNON: I was in attendance at that one. Especially down in Lunenburg, they were rather hostile to the minister.
MR. BANCROFT: Folks have to understand why things are being done and they have to be really good reasons.
MR. MACKINNON: I wanted to fast-forward on this other overall policy relating to bureaucracy. I want to relate an experience I had with regard to the training and the trials for rabbit hounds in the province in my particular jurisdiction. I am not entirely familiar with the lingo or the terminology but I believe anyone who is involved in your organization would understand what I am referring to.
There are two processes. One where they take the rabbit hounds out and they train them, they run them. I think they call that the training and then they have the trials, or it might be reversed. Anyway, historically in Nova Scotia that always took place around the time of the gestation with the rabbit population. For whatever reason, two or three years ago, a senior biologist within the Department of Natural Resources came to the conclusion that that can't happen anymore because what it does, it is having a negative impact on the rabbit population. They came up with the argument that it was killing the rabbit population and there was a high birth defect. I raised that with the senior biologist within the department and I wanted to find out if, in fact, they had any data to substantiate that policy change.
MR. RODGERS: Not that I am aware of. A couple of years ago . . .
MR. MACKINNON: If I could just finish, I was rather astounded to find out that they were basing their policy decision on something that happened in another jurisdiction. It is very difficult, in fairness, regardless of which political Party is in power, for politicians to answer to the public when decisions that are being passed to them by experts within the department are not basing it on facts within the jurisdiction. I was really disturbed by that policy decision because there was absolutely zero data to substantiate that policy position that there was a negative impact on the rabbit population and there was zero evidence to demonstrate that the running of these rabbit hounds, the training of these rabbit hounds, had in terms of the destruction or death of any rabbits. There was zero data. I was quite disturbed at that. They reversed it for that particular year but I think they are back at it again.
That goes back to your point about empire building within the department. How strong is some of the expert advice that we are getting? It is kind of an unfair question but it is very important because it has quite a major impact. It had a major impact on the economy in that particular wildlife sport in the jurisdiction that I represent.
MR. RODGERS: I think Bob and I are both going to have a comment on that one.
MR. BANCROFT: The gestation period is very short and they first breed in February where you get the rabbit circles in the snow; they are quite a social animal. My feeling and one of the reasons, quite frankly, I left government, was that there are a couple of problems and I have actually alluded to them a little bit in here, where most of the money in the province seems to be going in to health care and education and there is very little left for wildlife and inland fisheries and things like that. The biologists are put in a quandary here. I left because, quite frankly, I was embarrassed at the lack of resources and you are left in a situation where you are supposed to guess.
What we need are resource-based management strategies for wildlife and inland fisheries or fisheries in general that are based on enough sampling and enough monitoring that in fact we know what is going on. Then you can get ideas from other jurisdictions and you can sort of orient your research so you are not wasting a lot of time. We don't have a lot of extra money but what I am sensing in the wildlife and fisheries end of things is that we no longer have
adequate funds to be able to sample to know what is really happening anymore which becomes a real problem, Russell.
I feel sorry for biologists who are put in that position. Personally, I felt that the system had gotten so unwieldy that you weren't even being asked what the biological situation was before political decisions were being made anymore which is one of the reasons why I took the walk as fast as I could. There may be bad advice being given but most biologists I know are very conservative and try to give honest opinions. Now there are misinformed biologists just as well, put them five of them in a room and ask an opinion and you will probably get - but you were going to say something, too, Tony.
MR. RODGERS: I just support what Bob is saying about the lack of resources that they have to do that type of research. I know on a number of questions that we have put to DNR wildlife staff, they have gone to other jurisdictions to find out what the situation was in those jurisdictions that may be similar to Nova Scotia and this is probably where they came back. Making a decision based on that information, that is the first time I heard about that. They generally try to bring us some of their own information together.
Two years ago, within that department, they set up a rabbit or snowshoe hare committee which I served on and tried to deal with a number of situations, the snaring, the taking of rabbits by non-residents down in Cape Breton. There are a number of issues but one of them was the training of rabbit dogs and the breeding of those particular animals. I don't know how much direction they actually took from the information that was given to them because the participants were the Houndsmen Association of Nova Scotia and the Beagle Association and people of this nature with a lot more background and information. The only decision that we saw that came from that particular committee was one that we never supported but other than that, I wish I could give you some more information on that as to where they would come up with that decision but that is past.
MR. MACKINNON: Why would your senior policy advisers be afraid not to convey that message to their political bosses because that is very important to the very essence of that ecological balance, the nature, the whole essence of what you are presenting here today?
MR. BANCROFT: I don't think it is a deliberate thing but I do think that there is, as I say, like a shock absorber effect between senior policy people up top and the politicians who can actually make changes, like yourselves, and the people at the ground level. There is a lot of filtering that goes on and somebody up the line may have decided that this is not quite expedient or appropriate or something. It is the way the system doesn't work sometimes.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Mrs. Baillie, you had a question?
MRS. BAILLIE: Yes. I don't know if I should be asking this or not, but it is bothering me. I don't care for raping the forest, clear-cutting either. My husband had woodlots that were in his family before him. He used to love those woodlots and tended them, cut what had to be cut. We both worked and we didn't have to worry about saving that for our retirement. The lots
then were left to our children. Now people out there working you have the chance to put money in RRSPs and so on for your retirement, right? Like I, as a school teacher, did the same. But then we have maybe the small farmer or citizens out there who have woodlots, that is their retirement. They know they are going to sell that and that will be their retirement money. As government, have we the right then to tell that person, do you see where I am coming from?
MR. BANCROFT: Yes, I do.
MRS. BAILLIE: I don't like to see them clear-cut at all but then he has saved that for his retirement and so then he sells it.
MR. BANCROFT: Wouldn't it be nice if our education system made it so that people understood why they should be careful, they could still get money out of their woodlot on a regular basis, but rather than just destroy most of the capital, they could live off the interest in the woodlot, to use an economic term. I have a firm belief in some of Thomas Jefferson's ideas that, in fact, if you give people alternatives, they will come up with intelligent decisions, but our education system is not providing people with these alternatives to consider how to manage, and convention often has it, just go in and flatten it, in which case you have depleted your capital as well as the interest in the land, in terms of the nutrients and what the potential is.
I have seen situations where they cashed in the woodlot to send their son or daughter to become a biologist or a forester and you can't laugh at that. It is a sad reflection, but the reality is that you can actually manage in other ways, but we aren't getting that message across and I don't think politicians are going to have an easy time in this province until we do get that message across.
MR. RODGERS: The people who participate in thinking that way are gambling on Mother Nature not destroying that retirement fund for them, by fire or by disease of that particular woodlot. So to emphasize what Bob said, selected harvesting within that to take out the logs and then put the money in the bank over time would be a prudent thing to do, I'm sure, than just hope that everything is going to be fine at the end of the retirement.
MRS. BAILLIE: So you are saying education is the answer.
MR. BANCROFT: We are going to have to; that's why I have spent so much time at it myself.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Chipman.
MR. CHIPMAN: I couldn't agree with you more, Bob. Listening to Russell talk over there, I think of the property that I lived on; 30 years ago I used to be able to go down across the brook and there were rabbit tracks. When I went snowshoeing on Sundays, I walked a mile and I saw one rabbit track, and that's only within the past 30 years. Of course, we can blame it on coyotes, or whatever we want, which brought me back to think of a little humour. One of
my neighbours said one time, when talking about skunks, he said, we didn't have any skunks until a certain political Party got into power, but I won't mention his politics.
MR. MACKINNON: That's no way to talk about your boss. (Laughter)
MR. CHIPMAN: Mrs. Baillie brought up an interesting subject there. I have an article - I will get your address when we leave here - from a man named Smith from Oregon. He had a property - he was a woodlot manager - something like 250 acres and the figures were phenomenal. Apparently, they included in their scaling 4 million feet of wood fibre on this property, but they did what they call, I believe, individual tree selection where they just cut the big trees and let the undergrowth receive energy from that. Anyway, over a 10 year period, they harvested 5 million feet and there was still 4 million feet there, but that's including everything, like I said, because to have 4 million feet on 250 acres would be phenomenal; of course this is being organized as possible.
Something that has always bothered me, when I look at television - and I don't have cable at home, but I do watch at my mother's once in a while - look at the United States and you see bass fishing, trout fishing, and the money you generated through tourism, whether it's commercial or however, it's enormous. But we don't do anything here and one thing I brought up at caucus before, I would like to see DNR take a cross-section of lakes in the province, destroy the species, whether they are suckers or whatever you want to call them, certain species of fish, line the lake, stock them, close them to fishing for three or four years, and then open it. The spin-offs would be phenomenal, to me. Is this common sense? To me it is, but it's getting that message through to somebody else.
MR. RODGERS: Your first point, the one where we aren't doing anything, we still have an $81 million a year recreational fishing industry in this province, and we aren't doing anything? Could you imagine if we were? I think Bob brings up the point on the fisheries side of it, an MOU with inland fisheries has not been signed with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans for 10 years. That really would be doing something, being able to manage.
MR. BANCROFT: I have another hat, actually - I am the President of the Canadian Association of Small Mouth Anglers - you may be glad they aren't big mouth - but in any event, there are tournaments like what you see on television and there are federation folks involved in this too. So there is a little more happening in Nova Scotia than perhaps you realize, and bass are being introduced illegally all over the place.
MR. RODGERS: There were almost 60 bass tournaments in Nova Scotia last year alone.
MR. BANCROFT: And there is money involved, prizes, and some of the companies are putting money in here. So it is happening, sort of under your nose to some extent, Frank, although it's certainly not on a scale - but, yes, this whole business - Mr. Chairman, I don't want to run all over the place on you, but can we talk about . . .
MR. CHAIRMAN: Yes, you may.
MR. BANCROFT: We get along well with wildlife, but I never worked for the wildlife division - this is not a paid commercial - but the folks down there, we have a good relationship, as a federation, with them, but when it comes to inland fisheries, I have to confess that I worked for them for 10 years. When I came on in 1990, after leaving what is now DNR, I was told that the province would have an agreement with the federal government, a Memorandum of Understanding about managing the fisheries, the freshwater fishery, the inland fishery - about 37 different species of fish that inhabit freshwater in the province - and it hasn't happened.
I hope I'm not authoring its demise by bringing this to your attention today, but you are spending a very little bit of money. That's why I was going to Pictou all the time. There were three biologists and as soon as I left, that's one less biologist trying to manage the bass fishery and learn about what's going on with trout. We have two hatcheries that the province is managing to keep going, even though the feds have gotten out of theirs, and we are raising brown trout and putting brown trout where brown trout have already been introduced; it is a European species that was introduced a long time ago. They are raising rainbow trout and speckled trout and landlocked salmon, which are just another habit. They are in Grand Lake in Shubie, but they just don't go to the sea; they live there, it's a lifestyle choice.
Ultimately, one of the frustrations was that we didn't have a mandate. I remember working for Lands and Forests, and basically we didn't have a proper raison d'être, but they came up with one in my tenure. People felt that it doesn't mean much to the public, but if somebody says why are you doing this, you have something.
At the federation meeting last year, DFO came and gave a Sunday breakfast speech and they said they get along wonderfully well with the province. Well, if they get along wonderfully, why can't we have a Memorandum of Understanding about managing a very important resource to a lot of Nova Scotians? Trout fishing is the number one thing that a lot of anglers like to go for, but bass are becoming a lot of fun. In your part of the country, there are a lot of good bass opportunities.
[10:30 a.m.]
MR. CHIPMAN: I guess that's the point I was making. I am cognizant of the fact that there is one in Kings County, Aylesford, in that area there is a bass lake . . .
MR. BANCROFT: Oh, there are many.
MR. CHIPMAN: I know they have a tournament there, but Elliott Lake, they have a small mouth bass, they are very small, they are only about that big.
MR. BANCROFT: They are stunted.
MR. CHIPMAN: That's right, but they did introduce a trout there a few years ago, the tiger trout. Have you heard of that hybrid?
MR. BANCROFT: Yes, my department was . . .
MR. CHIPMAN: The growth is phenomenal in a couple of years. The road was almost destroyed to get in there; you had to have a four-wheel drive because the people would just flock in there to fish these trout. But I can think of other lakes that I fish and you don't get a bite, there's nothing in there. I guess the point I am making is, for a small investment, what a great way to generate a lot of revenue. People will buy a fishing license, they will buy food, they will buy camping equipment, they will buy vehicles to get into the woods, four-wheel drives, whatever.
MR. BANCROFT: Could I continue on? Tony, did you want to say something?
MR. RODGERS: Well, unfortunately, in some cases what you would like to see is being done illegally, people have been moving fish from these areas into other lakes where they don't belong and when you get a predator fish like the small mouth bass, you can kiss your trout fishing goodbye after they get into those systems. So for government to start doing that, I don't know how comfortable I would feel about them promoting that type of activity.
Small mouth bass was an introduced species, as Bob mentioned earlier, into areas where they had put up dams that forbid the migration of trout and salmon, so as to compensate and to put a recreational fish back in, they put in the bass. Where they are today, through the Annapolis Valley and in other areas, they have just become a tremendous resource. Do we want to see more brought throughout the province? Not at the sake of losing our trout. You have to be very careful. Once they get into a system, it doesn't take long, within that watercourse, before they start finding the feeder streams, the brooks and the rivers; the next thing you know, they migrate, they are everywhere.
MR. CHIPMAN: Just what you said earlier, Bob, you can educate, then you penalize.
MR. RODGERS: Enforcement is a real challenge.
MR. BANCROFT: We are dealing with an outdated federal Fisheries Act right now that is designed for the commercial fishery, and we can't get the changes that are needed for their recreational fishery, if you want to call it that, the inland fishery. Besides the Memorandum of Understanding, we don't have an effective way of doing enforcement, which encroaches not just on the inland fisheries people, but on the conservation staff that are important in this province, as well.
We represent organized hunters and fishermen in this province; there are folks that do things illegally that need to be made accountable. The only reason they will be accountable is if they think they might get caught, so we have been very happy to see - as much as I believe in education, there is that other arm that's very important, and I just want to take the opportunity
to stress that too. Right now, you and I could take a boat with a live well, load up bass, drive somewhere to another watershed, unload the boat, whip around the corner, unload the live well into the lake, and the chances of getting caught are . . .
MR. RODGERS: Some of our best salmon rivers now, the LaHave River and the Mersey River both have bass in them and as great a fish and a challenge that they are to fish, that is not where they should be. But somebody in their wisdom decided that they were going to move them. It's the same with pickerel. They were introduced down in Yarmouth County and now they are in Shortts Lake just outside of Truro, they are in Lily Lake in Hants County and they are moving around the province.
MR. BANCROFT: They are in Pictou County, in Muriel's area.
MR. RODGERS: There is a fellow in Truro who people have identified as Johnny Pickerelseed, but there's no law to prevent this guy from doing it unless you actually watch him put the fish into the water, and apprehend the fish and him after he has released it to prove evidence. So, what's the chances of him getting caught? They are nil. But he has an opportunity of ruining each fishery.
MR. MACKINNON: Just a footnote to that, my understanding is pickerel are quite hostile to trout.
MR. RODGERS: They are hostile to everything.
MR. BANCROFT: Fish-eating fish.
MR. MACKINNON: They will destroy the trout habitat in Nova Scotia, that's a known fact, as I understand it.
MR. RODGERS: They will quiet a lake right down.
MR. MACKINNON: They are nice to fish; I fished them up in northern Manitoba.
MR. RODGERS: They will take all the aquatics, the frogs, the ducks, the salamanders, whatever is going in a lake, they will silence a lake pretty quickly.
MRS. BAILLIE: Are they in my area?
MR. BANCROFT: They are in your area.
MR. MACKINNON: In terms of acid rain, has the acidity of our lakes had much of an impact on recreational fishing?
MR. BANCROFT: In western Nova Scotia it is pretty sad, because there is very little buffering capacity. The ability of the land to modify the rainfall pH is very low in places like Keji.
MR. RODGERS: Many of our clubs have taken on projects to help liming and whatever they can do to mitigate what has been going on there, but quite honestly we are quite far down the road now on acid precipitation and you can just see it building up there outside right now. Acid-laden snow that's ready to melt and go into our watercourses, that will happen in the spring. That's at the same time that these trout eggs are starting to hatch and rely on good, clean fresh water to develop and grow.
MR. MACKINNON: Is there anything that government can do to help with that, or is this industrial pollution so significant coming across the border . . .
MR. RODGERS: Signing and keeping agreements on emissions would be a very positive step, by all governments. If we could not just sign the piece of paper but actually say from this point on we are not going to pollute our air, which in turn pollutes our water, that would be a good start. Money, of course, is always an answer; you can lime all the lakes and rivers in Nova Scotia, but that's only a stop-gap, getting that one hit per season.
MR. MACKINNON: PCBs would be a negative factor, I guess, would they?
MR. BANCROFT: There are a number of other heavy metal problems, mercury for example, in the fish populations. The yellow perch populations are being eaten by loons and there are high in concentrations of mercury and that sort of thing. We have to be vigilant in this province; we should be more concerned and perhaps more knowledgeable about what is going on with our wildlife populations in that regard. May I continue?
MR. CHAIRMAN: We will leave it to you, Bob, to choose your topics.
MR. BANCROFT: I think this is working out, so as long as you as chairman feel that I . . .
MR. CHAIRMAN: I think it is going wonderfully well, but time is . . .
MR. BANCROFT: We are running aground here, yes.
MR. CHAIRMAN: We have 20 minutes to go.
MR. BANCROFT: Nobody has fallen asleep; kind souls. Perhaps I could pick up on what Russell has just said here and about what Tony alluded to, money, because I feel as a province and as legislative people, politicians, we aren't getting a very good deal from the federal government on some of these issues, wildlife and fisheries. I would just like to tell you, for example, there are people in this province who have come back from the West Coast to live who have worked on fisheries issues out there, where tens of millions of dollars are being spent
on fish habitat for West Coast salmon, to bring them back. If I can be blunt - and I have written about this in the Atlantic Salmon Journal - because I want you to understand precisely what I am saying, we are dealing with a bureaucracy in DFO, and this taking a little drib of money and spending it on hiring more people to tell us what to do instead of making money available for projects.
There is a history in this province, and there was a co-operative agreement between the province and the federal government that accessed money for a lot of groups that worked in the federation and other folks that were involved with fish habitat restoration, which relates, again, to this Cry Me a River thing that I am writing on. These groups were getting joint monies that were administered in recent times by the Nova Scotia Salmon Association, but some of our federation folks were getting grants to help - largely volunteers; sometimes there were students employed through make-work programs that were administered by the provincial government, through some of the government departments.
So the reality of it here is I don't feel, as a province, we are being fairly dealt with when it comes to the fisheries resource here; they have literally given up on salmon. They will ignore this, but they are looking out to the ocean saying there is a problem out there. The reality, ladies and gentlemen, is that we have a problem with land use and what's happened in our rivers and streams in this province that are relating to what has happened to our salmon and our sea trout, which the feds don't seem to have much interest in - they haven't been managing it much lately anyway - and they did have to give a letter to Fisheries that said that provincial Fisheries could manage trout and have two trout hatcheries, which is why the province owns two trout hatcheries.
I don't want to belabour the point, but I think we have serious problems with people who are also administering our resources who are claiming they have it, whether it is deep sea corals, in some of the gulleys, that are literally being wiped out. We may have a provincial interest in this and they may be claiming federal jurisdiction. But I think we need that memorandum, I think we need a fair shake. It is our taxpayers' dollars coming through the federal government, it isn't some magic money. It is Nova Scotians paying federal taxes and I think we need more of that.
I don't want to start lecturing here; cut me off, Jim, if I get too . . .
MR. CHAIRMAN: Well, I will mention that our Premier is on a crusade, a fairness campaign now and it is something that we very much need here in Nova Scotia, to get some of our money back into this province that we pay out to Ottawa.
MR. RODGERS: There is a parallel to that too, and that's where it comes from anglers and hunters themselves, because we sometimes feel that we are paying for conservation. I mentioned $81 million earlier that is generated in recreational fishing; there is another $36 million that is generated in six weeks of deer hunting in this province that's coming right out of the pockets of anglers and hunters. We don't mind reaching into our pockets every time we want to go into the woods and participate in our own recreation, that's part of what we have been
doing. In the past year, as a matter of fact, we have added $2.00 more to our hunting licences and through habitat's stamp, and that will now generate over $100,000 of new money that will be put back into the province's habitat.
When you talk about fairness, we sometimes wonder, when we look around at how much of that money that we have been generating through our taxation, through our licensing structure and so on, is actually coming back to support the activities that we are involved with. That has always been a concern. Again, we don't mind reaching into our pockets to pull out the bucks - when I am done it is usually in the $50 to $60 range just for licensing - but I get my dollars' worth, I feel, but on the other hand I would like to see more of it; sort of twist it back towards the people who are generating it.
MR. BANCROFT: Money has to be reinvested if we are going to monitor enough to be able to stop the rabbit situation that you talked about, to put it in a more direct context. For example, the angling licence that we pay is actually covering the cost of the two hatcheries and the staff at inland fisheries at Pictou.
MR. RODGERS: And $100,000 of enforcement money.
MR. BANCROFT: So the anglers are paying for it and I feel, personally, that there should be some more investment because we are only talking about the cost of the department, we aren't talking about the revenue - you mentioned the $81 million. There is a tremendous tourism and outdoor recreation value associated with these activities. We can work hand in hand.
I would politely point out that anglers and hunters are the ones who are paying for things. We do work with naturalists. They talk and are concerned a lot, but a lot of the conservation monies have been put in by the anglers and hunters. That is one of the reasons why I am sort of a crossover. I am a naturalist. I have been paid to be a biologist all of my life and I am a naturalist but, boy oh boy, when I wanted to see where the work was being done, where money was being put, that is why I was always involved as a professional with the federation going to the meetings because these folks are really important.
MR. RODGERS: Through Wildlife Habitat Canada, which is a government-based organization that handles money that is generated by duck hunters alone, over the last 10 years they have generated $350 million for wildlife habitat across Canada. That is something that can't be lost, and of course we enjoy our share of it here too in restoration projects and in generation of wetlands and so on. We are all familiar with Ducks Unlimited and the type of work that they are participating in. It is important for government to recognize the strengths involved within the hunting and fishing community and to support them, make sure that they don't die off and they have a good recruitment of new people coming in because when you lose that recruitment, you are going to lose those dollars and I don't think we can afford to back those dollars away. There are too many of them and they are being well used.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you. We have a short snapper, Mr. MacKinnon.
MR. MACKINNON: Mr. Chairman, you folks might be well aware of that bill that is before the House of Assembly now with regard to some of these land preserves across the province. Has there been any input from your organization sought from the Department of Natural Resources on that?
MR. RODGERS: Yes.
MR. MACKINNON: What are the implications? What have been the results? I attended a public meeting just in the last week or so and there was considerable concern about the fact that a lot of hunters and fishers - for the lack of proper language, I suppose - expressed concern that now they are not able to access a lot of these traditional fishing places and hunting areas.
I know in my area, that Bob, as you would well know, the large 3,300 acre block in Gabarus that was originally slated for the steel plant, I went through an elaborate cooperative arrangement with the federal government, through the TAGS program, to open up that road, accessing that large property, five and one-half miles long. The feds paid for it and just in the last six months or so the Department of Natural Resources issued a directive to shut that down. No one is allowed to access it now. It is very discouraging and that creates a lot of recreation fishing and hunting and that sort of thing. It is good for the economy. It is good for the whole ecological thing too.
MR. BANCROFT: There is a fine line here between too much access and not enough. If everybody can drive everywhere, probably the fishing is no good.
We are concerned about some of the bills, whether it is Bill C-17 federally where animal cruelty could be defined in so many different ways, the way it is being written. We are concerned, obviously, with Bill C-68, like some of the gun legislation that makes us feel like - it is funny, when you go to France and you say you are a chasseur or a pêcheur, it is oh, hey, a special thing. We are almost used to grovelling as anglers or hunters in this province. We are sort of jiggers and jackers and we have bloody hands and the reality is that we are not. It is a way of life.
If I was a wild animal, I would much rather have a reasonable life. Philosophically, I don't want to carry this too far, but raising a pig in a pen or a chicken in a little thing and then killing it versus the life that a deer or a rabbit has before it is killed, philosophically, there is room for hunting and angling still in our society if we are responsible people, I feel. Go ahead.
MR. RODGERS: I was just going to answer Russell's question there about our input. We have a similar opportunity here, that is Bill No. 73, the Nature Reserves Act. We have no problem whatsoever with opportunities of putting land aside in Nova Scotia. As a matter of fact, we supported the parks and protected areas, the 31 sites. We did have a couple of warnings during that protection and that was that we may be creating islands of opportunity. Instead of protecting the whole province, what we are doing is putting little bits and pieces aside that may, in the future, become opportunities for abuse and we are very cognizant of that.
The other thing that we wanted from that was that each one of these 31 sites would have its own management plan. To date nothing has happened in that respect. Again, that is money available through the Department of Environment and Labour to put these management plan meetings together and develop the management plans.
We have to be cognizant, I think, of the fact that we don't all live in Halifax. We don't all have the Neptune Theatre, bowling alleys and movies to go to. People in the rural areas look at hunting and angling and driving their ATVs and fishing and whatever they want to do as part of their recreation base so we have to make sure that the areas in which these protected areas are in, that they get an opportunity to say what is going to go on in those areas.
We did manage to preserve hunting, angling and trapping in a traditional sense within those 31 sites but there has also been discussion about how we would access that. For instance, they would say no motor boats or no motorized vehicles going in and so on but you have to be careful about that, too, because when you do that, you are also cutting off another segment of the population. You have disabled hunters and disabled anglers who would like to go in those areas and the only way they are going to get there is through motorization. But there is a balance. You can do it. It is just a matter of developing those management plans. If, after 200 years of angling and hunting in the Province of Nova Scotia, you can still look at a hunk of land and say, this is perfect, we want to preserve this, then obviously angling and hunting hasn't had a negative impact on that particular area. So why would you want to stop it?
The other opportunity is when you have anglers and hunters in that area, you have eyes and ears of the public out there watching those resources. You remove them from a certain area, the only people who are going to be in there then are going to be the people who want to destroy and ruin it.
MR. CHAIRMAN: I am just wondering now, in the remaining moments, is there some summary that you would like to present or is there some few minute discussion that you would like to have on a particular subject that we missed?
MR. BANCROFT: I want to thank everybody for being so attentive. There are lots more things to say. I would like to reiterate what Tony has just said there a little bit in that national parks have - for example, Cape Breton Highlands, just to be specific, there is a lot of resentment over people setting land aside and one of the ways to get them to value it is to let them have some form of use of it, whether it is hiking, angling or whatever. I think there are compromises here and I just hope that that can be the tenure of these new bills that are coming forward.
I guess I would like to point out that as a professional biologist, I valued having this federation to deal with because I wanted to be able to be in touch with the organized and the concerned people. It is interesting - and correct me, Tony - but I believe from our previous conversations, for 70 years there has been a small grant, around $7,000 in recent times, that was given to the federation to help. We only have one paid employee and he is right here. We are a federation of about 32 or 33 clubs and 6,500 direct members to those clubs and some direct members to the federation. It is interesting that in the year 2000 we lost the grant. It would
appear that the provincial government doesn't have room to assist people, federations like ourselves, anymore in the process of what I think we should be working together and it is difficult to fund-raise to keep a good man on top of the heap, so to speak.
I would just like to point that out perhaps in closing that I think it is kind of a sad reflection. I understand that there is no money. Health care and education are very important issues but there are other natural resource issues that this committee is supposed to be dealing with where I think you have to invest money or you are going to get bad rabbit management. You are going to get bad fisheries management. You are going to get bad wildlife management and half of this is people management and you have to keep that up too. When I became a wildlife biologist, I became very quickly aware of the fact that it isn't just wildlife we are managing, it is people we have to work with. You have to like people too and want to be with them and work with them.
So I hope that somewhere down the line we can have our grant and continue to work with government instead of throwing stones. There is a history that, when I was first a student, I remember biologists being fodder and a lot of bad feeling and we are past that stage now. There is a lot of working together. I really appreciate this opportunity for Tony and I to come here today to talk with you. It is a real honour. You folks have been elected. You have a lot of busy things to deal with. It was just a wonderful feeling when Darlene called and said, they want to talk with you. Tony, do you have anything you want to close with?
MR. RODGERS: I just want to mirror what Bob had said and thank you all for being so attentive. I have been with the federation in a full-time position now for 11 years and this is the first time that we have been asked to come and speak before this committee. We appreciate it very much. Sometimes we are viewed as an organization that the only things we have on our mind is the huntin' and the fishin' and nothing else, but I think you can see from the amount of areas that we are concerned with that it is much broader than that. There is an interconnectedness and we view this as part of our mandate, to deal with these issues. We will continue to.
Anything you guys can do to help us, we would appreciate it and anything that we can do in the future to help you, whether it is as individuals or if your Party has a need for a discussion on these subjects, please call us. We would be more than happy to come and talk.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you very much, Tony and Bob. I think you will agree that we had a most interesting conversation. I thank you for your contribution to that. You certainly brought to light some of the challenges that will be facing this government and indeed all Nova Scotians. I can assure you that the Standing Committee on Resources takes very seriously your comments that you have given us today. We will be providing you with a transcript of today's meeting and I will suggest that you should drive very carefully because it is snowing out again, and wish you most success with your federation.
Just before the committee leaves, you will note that there are a couple of additional names to consider for the Liberal Party and the PCs to take back for consideration that were
submitted by the NDP. Also, because of March Break and the fact that on March 6th we were not able to fill that date, the Chamber of Mineral Resources will be coming on March 20th. So that will be our next meeting. Thank you very much gentlemen and ladies.
[The committee adjourned at 10:58 a.m.]
