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November 16, 1999
Standing Committees
Resources
Meeting topics: 
Resources -- Tue., Nov. 16, 1999

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HALIFAX, TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 1999

STANDING COMMITTEE ON RESOURCES

8:00 A.M.

CHAIRMAN

Mr. James DeWolfe

MR. CHAIRMAN: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I think I will call the meeting to order. We are still waiting for a couple of members who I believe will be joining us shortly. I certainly want to welcome members from the Department of Natural Resources who have joined us this morning and we will get to the introductions in a minute. I just want to cover a few of the standard rules that we follow here. Normally, the presenters have a 15 minute, or so, presentation. In this case, I believe we have three presentations. So we will go through the presentations followed by some questions that we will field from the floor.

Also, without further ado, I think we should start with the introductions from the members of the Department of Natural Resources, if you would, for the purpose of recording and Hansard.

MS. ROSALIND PENFOUND: I am the Executive Director of Land Services with the Department of Natural Resources.

MR. ED MACAULAY: I am the Executive Director of Renewable Resources with the Department of Natural Resources.

MS. VICKI HARNISH: I am the Executive Director of the Planning Secretariat with the Department of Natural Resources.

MR. BRIAN GILBERT: I am the Executive Director of Regional Services with the Department of Natural Resources.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Perhaps we could now go around the table.

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[The committee members introduced themselves.]

MR. CHAIRMAN: We have quite a busy schedule this morning with three presentations. You will find that the two hours go by very quickly about which you will be very pleased, because you will want to get back to your departments and get down to the more serious day-to-day routine.

So without further ado, who would like to do the first presentation?

Ms. Penfound.

MS. PENFOUND: First, thank you for inviting us, we are pleased to be here. As I mentioned, I am the Executive Director of Land Services with the Department of Natural Resources and the responsibility for the Land Holdings Disclosure Act rests with our department and my branch. That is why it is me who gets to speak about this topic.

I thought I would proceed by way of giving you some kind of brief history of this issue in terms of how we got to where we are today and why we have the Act that we have and some of the issues that flow from that. We will start with a bit of history. In the late 1960's, there was a considerable amount of public concern expressed about the nature and extent of non-resident landownership in Nova Scotia. As a result of that, in 1969 an Act was passed, called the Land Holdings Disclosure Act or I guess more formally, the long title, An Act to Provide for the Disclosure of Land Holdings by Non-residents and Certain Corporations. Administration of that Act fell to the Department of Lands and Forests. I guess, at the time, the Department of Lands and Forests was the department of government most involved with land issues, by the very name, Lands and Forests. There wasn't any other government department that was doing general land work. The Department of Highways had land particular to highways, that kind of thing, but Lands and Forests was the department dealing most with land issues at that time.

Even after the Act was passed, there continued to be some concerns about what should be done about law and resident landownership. There was even, at one point, a proposal that there should be a tax on transfers to non-residents along with a requirement for government approval before you could do it. So that was one of the ideas that was floated at that time. As a result of those continuing concerns, in 1973-74 there was an all-Party Select Committee of the Legislature that travelled around the province and had public hearings and talked to a number of people across the province about this issue. It was chaired by Leonard Pace and Fraser Mooney, two well-known characters at the time, figures in public life, and there is quite an extensive report of all the hearings and who came and who presented what views and all those kinds of things.

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They produced a report and they documented the results of their hearings and they found that by and large the kinds of comments and concerns that were being raised to them seemed to relate more to land use as opposed to land ownership, what people were doing on the land as opposed to who owned it. The conclusion of their report, and this is one sentence right from it, "It is the conclusion of the Committee that the problem is not one of the purchase and sale of land, but the use of land.". So, as a result, they didn't propose any changes to the Land Holdings Disclosure Act that had been passed in 1969.

I will just give you a few highlights of what the Act says, the provisions of the Act. It is a very short little Act, actually, only a couple of pages. It defines a non-resident as not a permanent resident and includes a person who acquires on behalf of a non-resident. So you can't get around the provisions of the Act just by appointing an agent to acquire the land for you.

It doesn't apply within cities or towns and that is an interesting point because I think at the time the Act was passed, the concerns were mostly related to rural properties, coastal properties, as opposed to land within towns and cities but our towns and cities have grown considerably. There were a few years, because of municipal amalgamations, where we had situations where this Act did not apply in all of Halifax County or all of Cape Breton County because they became towns or cities with regional amalgamation. That was corrected with the Municipal Government Act, but there are a couple of years in there where the Act didn't even apply in those fairly large areas of the province.

It doesn't apply to companies incorporated or registered to do business in Nova Scotia or which actually carry on business on the land. So if you are a corporation that doesn't do that, then you have to comply. But if you are here and you are registered to do business and you are doing business here, then you are considered, I guess, to be a resident corporation.

The Act requires that you file a disclosure statement that gives your name, address, location of the land and some other details. I think it also asks for the purpose, so you might put summer residence or intended business or whatever. The Act, in terms of its enforcement provisions or the penalty provisions, sets up that the only penalty there is is for wilful non-compliance and it is a summary conviction offence with a maximum fine of $1,000. So it really is not very strong. Wilful non-compliance would probably be fairly hard to prove and even if you could prove it, you are looking at a maximum $1,000 fine. So it really has some serious weaknesses in terms of the ability to enforce those provisions.

A few more details here about the Act. It is pretty weak and ineffective. Just looking at those provisions, it is weak and ineffective for a couple of reasons. One of them being, there is no baseline. In 1969, when the decision was made, let's start collecting information about non-resident land holdings in Nova Scotia, there was no snapshot taken. There was nothing to establish, okay, in 1969, this is what the state of affairs is in terms of non-resident

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landownership. So we don't have that baseline of information. So even if the Act had been a great tool and we had been collecting all of the information and doing a terrific job with it, we wouldn't have had that starting point to really say, okay, now we have a true picture of what is going on.

Also, the Act doesn't require and subsequent sales have not been tracked. So if a non-resident buys land and then sells back to a resident, we might not get that. If we have a non-resident who sells to another non-resident and they file a disclosure statement, then that counts as two. There is no mechanism to balance or to keep track of what is happening with transactions after the fact.

Compliance is sporadic. We have made efforts over the years, and continue to do so, to put notices in the Nova Scotia Barristers' Society newsletter, to post notices in Registries of Deeds, to do things to make it as apparent as we can to people that you should comply. This is the law. You are supposed to do this. But even doing that, we know that compliance is sporadic. We do collect these forms and we keep a registry every year of what is happening with those forms, but we just know that we are not getting the kind of response that we should.

To be truthful, we also, I guess, have been looking at collecting these in the context of realizing that without a baseline, we are not sure what this information means anyway. It can certainly show you some trends if we were getting all of the forms but we know we are not. So enforcement is almost impossible, proving wilful non-compliance would be difficult, and there has been no clear way, historically, of checking residency. If someone doesn't file and they say they live somewhere else, well, I suppose you could do it, but it hasn't been part of the system and it has been a difficult thing to get a rope around. Prosecutions, as a result, have been non-existent, there haven't been any; nobody has been convicted of not complying with this Act.

As I mentioned, there are gaps of a couple of years because of the regional municipality situations being corrected, but there is a chunk in there when the Act didn't even apply in a couple of geographic areas, so the end result is that the information we have gleaned over the last 30 years from this Act is really not very meaningful or useful, it is not something that we really should be using for decision making; it just isn't strong enough to do that.

Having said that, however, it doesn't mean that concern has ebbed; in fact, we seem to be seeing, in the last couple of years, growing concern about the nature and extent of non-resident landownership. We see articles in the paper - and this just happens to be one, but there have been several - where there have been reports about people expressing concern over what is happening with non-resident landownership. Clearly, however, these are really just anecdotal reports; they are just people saying they know of a situation near them where a non-

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resident owns property, or whatever, but there isn't anything to really give us a full and complete picture.

There are things happening in Nova Scotia and things that we can address and things we can do, but before I tell you about those very quickly, I thought it might be useful to let you know what is happening, in a very brief way, in other provinces. I would caution that this is really just a snapshot; there is a lot more detail in each of these provinces and many more nuances around what they are doing. This is just kind of the quick and dirty report of, here is what is happening in the snapshot.

In Alberta, no more than two parcels totalling 20 acres; British Columbia, no restrictions on the sale of private lands; Saskatchewan and Manitoba have restrictions. Actually if you look at all the Prairie Provinces, their restrictions seem to relate more to agricultural land and who can own it and what the extent of ownership can be in terms of size. It likely has more to do with corporate farming and companies in that business as opposed to individual, non-residents owning land.

New Brunswick has no restrictions. Interestingly enough, New Brunswick has, in recent years, developed a coastal land management policy and I have looked at that just recently. It doesn't talk about who owns land, it talks about what you do on the land. So it is a plan to have measures implemented that control or put guidelines around what you can do in a coastal zone. They define an area between the ordinary high water mark and a certain limit in the upland; there are certain things that you can and cannot do within that area, but it doesn't address who can do it, who can own the land.

Newfoundland has no restrictions; Ontario has no restrictions. Quebec has a pretty hefty one there - 33 per cent tax on the transfer to a non-resident and permission is required for more than four hectares of farmland. So, again, an agricultural thing creeping in there. Prince Edward Island, you must have government permission if you are going to require more than 10 acres of land or more than 100 feet of shoreline, and you pay double tax. I think the way it works in P.E.I. is that everybody gets taxed at a pretty high rate - I think this is right - but if you live there you are forgiven 50 per cent. I think there is a constitutional issue around how the tax is implemented, and that is how it works. But at the end of the day, if you don't live there, you are paying twice as much in terms of tax than if you do live there.

What do we know or don't know about land in Nova Scotia and who owns it? Well, 75 per cent of Nova Scotia is privately owned. If you look at provinces like B.C., they are up over 95 per cent publicly owned. So, based on where we are, the size of our province and the fact that this end of the country was settled first, it really affects our ability to control what is going on with the land and, actually, this percentage of private versus public land is an issue that you will hear my colleague speak to in terms of integrated resource management and our ability to manage what is happening in Nova Scotia's land base. It is one of the earliest areas

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of settlement in the country and, as a result, there is only 25 per cent in public hands, so 75 per cent is owned by private people.

Concerns are still being expressed about non-resident landownership, more in the past couple of years. It seems like there is more; whether there really is more, it certainly seems like there is. There are lots of anecdotal examples about what is happening.

In Nova Scotia there are 500,000 non-commercial parcels of land. If you go and look in the records at the Department of Housing and Municipal Affairs, they will tell you that there are approximately 500,000 parcels. Now some of those parcels might be half an acre, some of them might be 500 acres, 1,000 hectares, whatever, but 500,000 parcels of land. The assessment role in Nova Scotia, from last year, would show 35,200 or 7 per cent of those parcels are owned by someone with an address outside of Nova Scotia.

There are a couple of cautions I want to say in terms of telling you those numbers, this is not 7 per cent of the land base. You can't say, okay, Nova Scotia is made up of 13.5 million acres and 7 per cent is owned by non-residents. This is 7 per cent of the number of parcels. Some of those are big parcels, some of those are little parcels. This also includes land in towns and cities. This is not the Act, this is what the Department of Housing and Municipal Affairs shows on the assessment role. If a non-resident owns a condominium or they happen to own a 100' by 40' lot in the middle of Halifax, that is counted as a parcel. In terms of parcels, that is what we have.

It is also important to note that this is just mailing addresses. It probably is the best picture we have of who owns land in Nova Scotia right now, in terms of residency. But those mailing addresses are collected from a number of sources, and they are collected for purposes other than tracking residency. Most people probably get their tax bill where they live, but it is certainly possible that people don't. Some people may have an agent receiving it here, they may have a relative picking up their mail. There may be inaccuracies that are in those kinds of numbers, using them for this purpose. They are great for mailing out tax bills and assessment notices, but for tracking residency, it is not perfect. It might be the best thing we have, but it is not perfect.

In 1969 when the Land Holdings Disclosure Act was passed, the Department of Lands of Forests, which later became Natural Resources when it combined with Mines and Energy, was the department of government that knew about land. The Department of Natural Resources is still a department that knows about land. We are public land managers. We are the department that is responsible for managing the resources and the land base in Nova Scotia in terms of public land. You will hear from my colleagues about the things that we are doing to accomplish that.

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Over that intervening 30 years, however, we now have another government department that is expert in land information management. This is really what we are talking about. We are not talking about managing the land, we are talking about managing the information about the land, in terms of getting a picture of who owns the land and what is happening on it and that is the Department of Housing and Municipal Affairs. That department now houses Registry of Deeds, assessment and what was formerly known as the Land Registration Information Service, and that was the agency of the Council of Maritime Premiers that over the last 20 to 25 years built up the property records database.

Now you can actually go on-line and find out who owns property. They have owner name, mailing address, property location, valuation. They have a lot of information available on all parcels of land in Nova Scotia. The accuracy is increasing day to day, so if you have ever had an opportunity to look at that database, it is a wonderful tool. There are some problems in using the information they have to track residency because the system wasn't built to collect that kind of information. It is probably not a big leap to tinker with that system and say, we can use this as a way to get residency. We have been considering some ways to make that happen.

At this point, we don't know whether non-resident landownership is up, down, what the trends are. We know that some people obey the law and they file those disclosure statements; we also know that some don't. We don't know how many, and we don't know in any given year whether we are getting 90 per cent or 10 per cent or whatever. We also don't know for sure what all the goals are that we might want to accomplish, or what government might want to accomplish, in terms of addressing this issue.

Should we be trying to discourage people from moving to Nova Scotia? Should we be trying to limit the number of acres that people own? Should we be trying to restrict acquisitions by non-residents? Should we be trying to restrict what people can do with their land, in terms of who they sell it to? Should we be trying to increase the tax base? There are a lot of issues in terms of directions that can be taken in terms of how to deal with these questions.

These issues keep coming up, and people call my office and write in and express concerns or ask questions about some of these things. How much land is owned by non-residents in Nova Scotia? What kind of land is it? Is it coastal land? Is it farm land? Is it in rural municipalities? Is it in urban municipalities? We don't have a really good picture of that. Clearly we need better information. You need better information so that you can make decisions about other measures that might be appropriate.

We need that snapshot, and then we need to be sure we have mechanisms to keep that information up to date. Opportunities do exist to acquire that, and I will address those quickly in a moment. One of the concerns that has been raised a few times recently is access to Nova Scotia's coastline or shoreline. There seems to be a perception - and I say perception because

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I really don't know - that a non-resident might be more likely to restrict your access over their private land to the shore than would a native Nova Scotian or a resident Nova Scotian. I don't know if that is right or not, but there seems to be a perception that a non-resident would stop you from walking over their land to the shoreline more than someone who lives here all year. Perhaps they would, who knows.

There are concerns expressed about the lack of contribution by non-residents to our infrastructure. People who only live here for a couple of months out of the year, they are not buying their groceries here, for the large part, they are not buying their car here, they are not buying all their gas here, they are not doing all those things and contributing through the normal expenditure of money and contribution to our tax base. They pay property tax, but there is concern expressed about, well, maybe they are not paying their fair share of the infrastructure that supports their landownership, the road that is paved in front of their house, all those kinds of things. However, people who are non-residents would say, yes, but I am not using your medical system either. There is always kind of a flip side to all of these things.

Local property values can be affected. If a non-resident buys near you and they pay a lot of money for that land and they put up a very expensive home, that can increase your assessment, possibly. Some people will complain that that is a negative effect on them as a neighbour. We have also heard people, resident Nova Scotians say, I don't like this because I have lived here all my life and I always hoped that by the time I grew up and saved enough money, I would be able to buy land in my community and live there. I always thought that I could buy a piece of Nova Scotia's coastline, and now I can't because it is priced out of my range because the market is different than it was when I grew up. Now there are non-residents who will come and buy that land.

I have to tell you, for every person who says that, there is someone who will say, well, that is my nest egg. I have owned that land all my life. I would like to sell it to the highest bidder, thank you very much. You might have an RRSP, you live in Halifax and come and drive down and enjoy my scenery. You contribute to an RRSP. That is my RRSP, the increase in value in my property. I would like to be able to sell it and get the best amount of money for it. You hear both sides of that issue as well.

Certainly if non-residents or anyone is buying land at higher prices, that will put the assessment up and that will increase the tax base in that particular municipality. That may be a good thing for municipalities. Certainly the Union of Nova Scotia Municipalities probably has something to say about that, in terms of whether they think it is a good or bad thing to have land owned by people who don't live in the municipality as opposed to the bonuses that might be there in terms of an increased tax base.

The other interesting point is that there are really differing views about who is a non-resident. If you live in Cumberland County and somebody from Halifax owns a cottage and comes up there for two weeks in the summer, you probably think they are a non-resident even

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though they are Nova Scotian. We certainly have heard those views about just how far away do you have to be to be a "come from away", and how many months of the year do you have to not live in the province?

There are those snowbird people. They are Nova Scotians that perhaps, for whatever reason, like to spend part of the year in warmer climates and they don't live here all the time. Are they non-residents? If you were born in Cape Breton but you had to go to Toronto to get a job and you have been living there for the last 35 or 40 years, but you own property in Cape Breton, are you a non-resident? Should there be rules that affect you differently than affect someone who perhaps lives in Germany or Kentucky?

There is the, outside of the county, outside of the province, outside of the country, outside of the continent discussion. Also there is the discussion of how long is permanent? I think traditionally most provinces have looked at this permanent residency thing, I think, the same way as the Income Tax Act does, I think six months is kind of a period that applies in a number of contexts in terms of medical services and all those kinds of things.

It is an interesting discussion in terms of who is really a non-resident and if there are measures that are going to be undertaken or considered in terms of restricting what you can own, then that is a very important question, you know, figuring out just exactly who would be caught by those measures.

That is kind of a brief background. I thought perhaps now I could just very quickly, and then I will conclude, I do not want to cut into anybody else's time. As I mentioned, we have been hearing concerns expressed about the issue of non-resident landownership in Nova Scotia. Over the past couple of years there has been a committee of officials: from the Department of Housing and Municipal Affairs because they are the people who are expert in land information management; the Department of Natural Resources because we are the people with responsibility for the Act, even though it is a weak and ineffective tool and it has not really gotten us a whole lot in recent years, we have had that continuing involvement; the Department of Justice because we need their expertise on anything that might be considered; and the Department of Finance because there may be financial concerns around measures that are taken or financial issues.

[8:30 a.m.]

We have been meeting and trying to consider some of these things, you know, what measures could be taken, what are the issues, what do people want us to do. I guess the two key things we have been trying to address are, how do we get better information and how do we keep it current because that is key to knowing what is going on. There may be many interested parties who have a stake or think they would like to be heard on this - the Union of Nova Scotia Municipalities, landowners, lawyers, realtors, the Federation of Agriculture. There is a long list of people who have an interest and concern in this. So information and

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keeping it current is one issue. The other is developing a framework for policy formulation. If we want to take a broad range of measures or consider them, you need to be sure that you are thinking your way through all those issues and have them all tied together so that any measures you take address the concerns that you want to address and accomplish what you want to accomplish.

We have been trying to get a rope around how to really get a good picture of the extent of non-resident landownership, how to get a rope around public sentiment on this and how to help government consider policy objectives in terms of discouraging, encouraging, limiting ownership, whatever. Government has committed to introduce legislation to permit municipalities to tax non-resident property owners at a higher rate than residential landowners and that commitment is within the first mandate. I have spoken with my colleagues at the Department of Housing and Municipal Affairs and they are working on developing the appropriate mechanisms for government to be able to do that. So that is a commitment of government. The committee of officials is continuing to work on addressing a broad range of other options that government may wish to consider.

Those are my remarks on non-resident landownership. Why don't we turn the stage over to my colleagues, but I would be happy to answer any questions when the time comes.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you, Ms. Penfound. I think what we will do is hold off on the questions until the end to ensure that every presenter has a fair opportunity to do their presentation. Mr. MacAulay, are you going on next? Then I would just ask you to proceed if you would, please, sir.

MR. MACAULAY: Thank you. Our part of the presentation is on the integrated resource management process that we have currently under way on Crown land. As I indicated at the beginning, I am Ed MacAulay. I am Executive Director of Renewable Resources and as such my areas of responsibility include wildlife, parks and recreation, and at the time we began this process, it also included the Protected Area Program which is now housed in the Department of the Environment. It also includes forestry.

Accompanying me are two colleagues, Vicki Harnish, who was introduced at the beginning. Vicki is the executive director of our Planning Secretariat, but she is also the chairperson of our provincial IRM planning team. As such, she and her team oversee the program itself. The third member of our team here is Brian Gilbert who is the Executive Director of Regional Services and it is within Brian's branch that all of our regional teams, the administration of those teams are housed. Brian will be available to help with questions at the end of the presentation. Vicki and I will tag-team a bit on the presentation here if you bear with us.

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This is a very difficult and complex issue. We have a bit of a presentation. I hope you can bear with us through this and, hopefully, we will answer some of your questions as we go and certainly we will be available afterwards to try to answer them as best we can.

We were asked, as I suggested, to give an overview of the IRM process. What I intend to do first is give you a bit of background, why we ended up with an IRM process and why we felt it was necessary and some of the history surrounding where we are today. I am going to turn it over then to Vicki who will give you some detail on the process we are using and some of the expected end results. I intend to conclude with where we will be going in the future and some timetables.

So to begin, I thought it would be appropriate to review the Crown land and what we we are dealing with. The IRM process is certainly only on Crown land. We are dealing with the Crown land that is administered by the Department of Natural Resources. This land, the administration and control of that is given to the Minister of Natural Resources under the Crown Lands Act. We certainly are not dealing with or involved in any lands that are held by any other department - Housing, Transportation and so on. Those are excluded from this process and just to set the stage a bit, I put the percentage of land holding up, we are dealing with about 24 per cent of the province. I am sure you are all aware we are second only to Prince Edward Island in the smallest amount of Crown land for any province in Canada.

Up until, I guess, the early 1990's the process that we used to manage and administer Crown land involved individual resource sectors developing their own resource management plans. We practised, at the time, a process which we called multiple resource use. We tried to accommodate all and every use on the Crown land that was available from forestry through to mineral exploration, recreation and so on.

It became very obvious to us in the 1980's and certainly in the early 1990's that there was increasing pressure on the Crown resource. We had gathered better information. We had better inventories. We were finding that more and more our individual resource plans were clashing. There was conflict being established on a variety of sites. We went through a parks and protected area strategy in the 1990's that established 31 protected areas culminating very recently in an Act last fall and the subsequent protection of 31 sites on Crown land.

We also were involved in the program with Nova Scotia museums for the protection of ecological reserves. More and more we were getting involved with groups like Ducks Unlimited for the protection of wetland in our wildlife branch and we were finding that some of the forestry operations were conflicting with some of our wildlife issues of deer-wintering yards and things like nesting sites and so on. So it was very obvious to us that there was much more stress on the Crown land resource and we had to be more involved in and more adamant about involving all the resources and decisions on each and every block.

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With that in mind, just to give you some examples of some of the things that were happening that were causing the stress, this slide reads commitments federal, but it should really be commitments national. Through the late 1980's and early 1990's there was a whole series of national initiatives that through either administration policy or principle would have some impact on the way Crown land was managed and, in fact, the way all land in Nova Scotia would be managed directly through policies of the department and indirectly through commitments that we may have made.

I have just listed some of these here, the national forest strategy. We have now three 5 year strategies. This is our third we have just concluded. There was the Whitehorse mining initiative. There was the signing of a national accord for the protection of species at risk. We also agreed to the Canadian biodiversity and we are directly involved in supporting the Canadian Council of Forest Ministers criteria, indicators for sustainable forestry. I have already spoken of the protected areas program and that was really a commitment that came from the Tri-Council Statement on the Commitment of Protected Areas. The tri-council there is the National Council of Forest Ministers, the National Council of Wildlife Ministers and the National Council of Environment Ministers. I am sure I have left some out, but they are just intended to give you an example of some of the policy commitments that were being made on Crown land.

On a provincial basis, at the same time, we were developing in Nova Scotia a sustainable development strategy that talked about our industry and its importance to the health of our industry and to the economy. We reacted to the National Forest Strategy with a set of provincial action plans which we committed to, particularly on Crown land and in policy on all land. We had a Nova Scotia Protected Area Strategy, which was the result of the national commitment on protected areas. I think most people would recognize the results of that and have already mentioned it. In the mid- and late 1980's, we published a series of policies on forestry and wildlife parks and minerals.

Prior to the IRM planning process - I put this slide up just to give you some indication of the kinds of commitments that were already made with respect to the land base itself - we have about 3.5 million acres of Crown land, as indicated. There are an incredible variety of kinds of commitments that are being made, all of which have an impact on all of the other resources. They either exclude other resource use or very much limit their ability to manage. I am not going to go through the entire list, but I think it is obvious from the list that most of the Crown has some element of commitment associated with it now. The last line where it says, Remaining Provincial Crown Land, which is only 460,000-odd acres.

This slide was done for another purpose and we identified the 20-odd licence agreement holders on Crown land as having to be dealt with there. But it is much broader than that. It deals also with mineral exploration; it deals with those wildlife wetland areas we have been speaking of, where we know we have to have an element of protection included. It also includes things like mineral exploration and so on. So the resource is definitely under

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a fair amount of stress. It was very obvious to us that we needed to do something that would more appropriately reflect that and make sure that all of the resource interests were protected.

Just a little bit of history: in 1991, there was a merger of the Department of Lands and Forests and the Department of Mines and Energy to form the Department of Natural Resources. With that merger we now have under one department forestry, wildlife, parks and recreation, and at that time, protected areas, as well as mines and energy and mineral resources. In 1994, we began a pilot project on integrated resource management. We tried a variety of approaches to see which would be best for Nova Scotia. We looked at other provinces and how they were dealing with this type of situation. We tried to avoid the pitfalls that were very obvious in some of the other provinces. Some of them were so difficult that they were consumed in legal obligation and they really didn't move forward. Others were so complicated that it became very difficult to comply with.

So we established in 1994 a pilot project in Cumberland and Colchester Counties. In 1995, we went through, as did a lot of departments, a restructuring and as part of that restructuring we decided that we must integrate our resource base and we established, as a principle in our organization, Integrated Resource Management teams in each of our three regions. At the same time, we decided to establish a provincial IRM team, which Vicki now chairs. Given those moves in 1996 we expanded the Cumberland-Colchester pilot project to include Halifax and Hants Counties, which was the entire central region. They began the IRM planning process for that central region in vigour. It ceased to be a pilot project and became an operational program.

Later in that same year, we expanded it to the Eastern Region and the following year to the Western Region. To explain the process in some detail, I am going to ask Vicki to give that presentation.

MS. VICKI HARNISH: Good morning. I would like to tell you in a little more detail exactly what integrated resource management planning is and the process that we are using for integrated resource management planning on Crown land. This is the Crown land that is administered by the Department of Natural Resources. This wouldn't be the Crown land, for example, that the Department of Transportation and Public Works or other departments administer.

Integrated resource management is defined as a planning and decision-making process. Through this process we consider all of the various resource values and uses for the land, uses to which it might be put. We look at what the public interest is. We incorporate a number of concepts. Really, it is all about achieving a balance and coming up with a strategy that provides for what we describe as the optimum mix of uses for the land; minimizing the conflicts, that pulling and tugging that you saw on the picture that Ed put up earlier, and balancing the environmental, social and economic benefits that are possible through the use

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of Crown land and we just call it a process of making choices to a certain degree, as much as anything.

Now within the department we really have three levels or tiers of integrated resource management planning. The first tier, and this is where Ed referred to my chairing, is through our Integrated Resource Management Land Use Committee. It is certainly the senior policy level committee overseeing integrated resource management planning. It is comprised of 11 directors within the department: all of our resource directors, our regional directors, our Director of Crown Land Management, our Director of Land Administration. We are charged with overseeing the development of an IRM planning framework and the various regional strategies for management of Crown land, setting objectives for the use of Crown land, and this would be according to the policies and the priorities of government, identifying where our various policies may, in fact, be incompatible.

For example, it may well be that some of the goals we have set under wildlife policy may not be compatible with the goals we would have set under our forestry policy or our mineral policy. So this committee identifies these conflicts where it is not all possible and recommends changes, as necessary, and it also coordinates our department's input into interdepartmental and intergovernmental resource management and land use issues. That is kind of the top or the first tier of integrated resource management policy and planning.

Now the second level is what I am going to tell you more about in just a few minutes; it is our integrated resource management planning process at the regional level. At that level we have teams in every region that prepare integrated resource management strategies for the use of Crown lands within that region. Our third level of effort is really at the operational level. It is the way we do business these days. Any transaction proposed for Crown land that we administer, whether it is acquiring new land, disposing of Crown land in some way or issuing a permit that allows a particular use of the Crown land is first reviewed from an integrated resource management perspective. This means all of the sectors take a look at that proposed transaction, see how it would impact on their own particular sector - whether it is wildlife, parks, minerals or forestry - and put forward a recommendation to us that says it is a good idea or in view of the implications this transaction would have for the objectives that we are trying to achieve within our sector, we think it is a bad idea.

Certainly it is a multi-disciplinary look at any transaction that we undertake. We just say, it is the way we now must do business. During these IRM reviews of transactions, just to note, we do consult with other departments that would have a particular interest, as their mandates might be impacted by the potential transaction. This all happens on an operational basis.

What I am going to tell you about today, specifically, is the process that we are out there using right now for that second tier of IRM that I just described, which is the planning process for Crown land. We have a 10 step process that we established. Now this was the

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result of the pilot project that we undertook initially in Cumberland and Colchester Counties. We learned a lot about how we should go about planning for the use of Crown land. As a result, we have set up a 10 step process establishing the teams, and we have established a team per region. I am going to tell you more about a number of these steps in just a minute.

The second is preparing resource inventories, just looking at where the Crown lands are, what the resources are on the lands, the uses to which they might be put: identifying the issues, concerns, conflicts, potential uses, any management strategies, any issues related to the use and the allocation of Crown land; consulting with stakeholders, at that point, to hear what they believe the issues are; setting regional goals and objectives for the use of Crown land, and the use would be consistent with the provincial policies that we have for each of our various sectors; obtaining any extra information and then evaluating the options for the use on a parcel-by-parcel basis of our Crown lands; preparing the strategy, taking the strategy back out to the public, adopting the strategy, implementing it, reviewing it, monitoring its success or failure; and lastly, developing the working plans at the local area level that will effect the strategy. That, in a nutshell, is the process.

We are carrying out this integrated resource management planning process for Crown land under a number of what we call our guiding principles. These are kind of the high-level principles under which all decisions will be made. Ensuring environmental responsibility means making sure that any approach we use to resource management reflects scientific information on the environmental impacts of uses and any mitigation techniques available. Inclusiveness means providing an opportunity for all stakeholders, interests and interested parties to participate in the planning process, and recognizing the views and the values of all of those who do participate.

Maintaining biodiversity means making sure that we can maintain the variety of plants, animals and other organisms at all levels, including diversity of genes, species and ecosystems. That is what biodiversity really means. Multiple use is recognizing that we can often use land for a number of uses at the same time, either sequentially or simultaneously. Sustainability means requiring that resources are used in a way that doesn't lead to a long-term decline; in other words, maintaining the potential of those resources for future generations and, as I spoke of earlier, optimizing the benefits that are available to us through the use of these resources on Crown lands. This means balancing the competing interests and the uses possible for the land and providing a wage range of benefits for all Nova Scotians.

At the provincial level, we have set a number of goals that we hope to achieve through the strategy that we are developing. There are six goals here, and under those goals are many objectives and they have all been established over the years through our various sectoral policies. I guess one of our big challenges is going to be to figure out if we can we meet them all or do we have to make some compromises; for example, using renewable resources within long-term sustainable levels. That includes harvesting of forest products; using wildlife species, managing wildlife habitat, all on a sustainable basis, while honouring existing

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contracts, licences and leases that we have out there; ensuring environmental protection and biodiversity, things like maintaining the natural ecosystem integrity; managing significant wildlife habitats; recovering endangered or threatened species; protecting representative landscapes and minimizing environmental disturbances; meeting our outdoor recreational and heritage protection needs; providing a wide variety of recreational and tourism opportunities on the Crown land base, including managing and operating our parks; using mineral and petroleum resources in keeping with sustainable development principles; maximizing opportunities to explore and develop for minerals; maintaining access for mineral exploration to the land and stability of mineral and petroleum tenure. This has been an ongoing difficulty for the mineral sector in particular, just having access to the land so that they can really take a look at it and see what mineral potential may be there. It is something that you never know what is really under the land, you have to have access to the land in order to try to figure it out.

Providing equitable opportunities for Nova Scotians to share the benefits from their resources on Crown land, and that is recognizing the wide-ranging number of uses available and the balances, and maintaining a base for jobs and incomes. Certainly natural resources can provide significant benefits to the economies of our communities; they are very rurally dispersed, they are geographically dispersed. It means doing things like providing for the supply of wood products, providing parks, providing opportunities for mineral and energy development; just a lot of objectives for a very small land base.

Back to our process overall. The first step in the process, you will remember, was establishing the regional planning teams. We have done that. We have three regions. We administer the province on a regional basis; there are three within the Department of Natural Resources and we have established one team per region. These teams are comprised of our regional staff as well as specialists in the various resource sectors. You will see that on these teams we have biologists, extension specialists, parks and recreational planners, geologists, Crown land foresters, forestry planners, land administration people, and every team has a member of the protected areas program on it.

These teams were started, if you remember, before the protected areas program was moved to the Department of the Environment. Even with the move, we felt it very important because that is one major use of Crown land, to maintain representation of that program. There is quite an integration between our parks and our protected areas program. It is an integrated program in reality. Other support is needed: land use planners, communications people and so on.

The first thing that we had each of our teams do under this process is prepare an inventory, pull together all the information that they have about the Crown land base and the resources on it. For example, we looked at and we have compiled, in this inventory, information on the infrastructure existing on Crown land, whether there are roads, pipeline corridors, utility corridors, things like that; where the water is, fresh water, coastal structures;

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any types of infrastructure, information on the Crown land itself in terms of the amount of land in each region, the existing uses, influences by private land, land commitments; forestry information: type of forestry covered, general descriptions; timber production; wood supply data; information on parks and recreational opportunities; a general description of what kinds of parks we operate; what values there are within the land, any unique and rare features, for example, where the protected areas are, the kinds of values that are protected within those areas, where the trails are, where the heritage rivers are, all of that kind of information.

[9:00 a.m.]

Information on wildlife, where the significant wildlife habitat might be, for example, what kind of habitat there is, where our wildlife sanctuaries would be, where we have any special needs for wildlife. Information on mineral and energy resources, what resources have already been delineated, where we are producing or where minerals have been produced in the past, where there are commitments out there to exploration as to who is holding claims where, petroleum resources as well.

All of this information has been put together for every parcel of Crown land. It has been documented on maps, it has been documented in publications. We have provided this information to anyone who wanted to participate in the planning process. This means, the public, our stakeholders. Certainly, there is a lot of information there and we have done our best to make it widely available so that when we ask the public what kind of uses they recommend for Crown land, they are able to provide us with an informed opinion.

Then, once we documented the inventory, we undertook the first round of public consultation. We asked our teams to undertake this consultation under a set of principles, and you will see what they are here - open, representative, objective, flexible, timely. What that really means is that we wanted to make sure that our consultation process provided for fair and complete representation of all interests, that a comprehensive range of issues would be addressed, that participants were coming to it well informed, that we were giving them the information they needed to fully participate, that we would undertake to report back to participants on what we had heard from them and how we used that information and that we would consult in a number of ways to ensure the greatest amount of input. We have used workshops, surveys, questionnaires, one-on-one consultations, as appropriate.

The objectives of our consultation were to really find out from our stakeholders and our clients how they used Crown land, what activities they carried out on it, what interest they would have for future uses of the land. We wanted them to identify for us any issues they believed we needed to consider when making our plans, whether they were general policy- related issues or they were specific issues related to management practices, for example. We also wanted to gather any suggestions that they had to help us improve the way we manage Crown land.

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We consulted with various client groups, business and industry and that doesn't include just resource sector businesses and industry, but any business or industry clients who would be dependent on the Crown land base or the activities on it in some manner, special interest groups, aboriginals, a wide range of what we call general publics; anyone who was interested in participating that in some way wanted to use the Crown land or would be influenced by the way Crown land was used, municipalities, other government departments and our own staff. In other government departments, there a number who have an interest in the use of Crown land that we administer; Environment, Agriculture, Transportation and Public Works, and Tourism, among others.

Just the extent of consultation that we undertook in Phase I, by region. You can see we had a lot of participation. In the western region, 11 workshops around the region, input from 362 people; in the central region we had 10 workshops, 445 people who thought it was important enough to come out and tell us what they thought; and in the eastern region, 28 workshops, 548 people. As well, our staff there made a concerted effort to get into the schools and they surveyed the students. I think part of the reason for that was because really it is our children who influence what the parents think and we wanted to try to see if we could stimulate interest that way as well and it has worked really well. We are learning, in fact, as we go.

What I am going to show you is results from the eastern region. I did not cherry-pick. It just happens that the eastern region is the only region that issued a survey to participants to find out whether or not they were pleased with the results of the consultation process that they attended. We held separate consultations for government people, and that included the municipal units as well as provincial and federal government participants, and then we held public workshops. So these are the results from the government consultations.

Generally, the question was how satisfied were you with, and then a number of features of the workshop - 1 would be very low and 5 would be very high. Overall people were well satisfied, but I think there are a couple of things that are particularly interesting here. Their understanding of integrated resource management, you will see the second from the bottom, before they participated in the workshop they rated their understanding as relatively low, 2.4 on a scale of 1 to 5, but by the end of the day there is a notable improvement in how well the participants believed they understood the process. Look, too, at how pleased they were with the material that they received in advance - about 3.5 out of 5 - the maps that we prepared for them to take a look at so that they could see what resources were available and how they were being used and the skills of our facilitators.

What is more interesting, I think, or what you may find even more interesting - this is just a bunch of government people, is what the public thought about our consultation process in the eastern region. You will see here too, if you look about four up from the bottom, we asked people, did they have enough opportunities to express their opinion, 4.6 out of 5; they were pretty happy with the opportunities presented to them. The bottom two,

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their understanding of the process six months ago compared to how well they think they understand the integrated resource management process now at the end of their workshop, 2.2 to 3.9. Overall, I think we can conclude from that that we must be doing something relatively right.

What did we do with the information that we obtained from these people at these workshops? That is a lot of people with a lot of opinions expressed. We have set this information up in a database and this is just an example of the database used in the eastern region. We have recorded for every participant their name, what workshop they attended, what comments they made. So if you, John Smith, came to our workshop in Cheticamp and you said you have a favourite thinking rock in this particular location, we can go into the database, pull up that location and find out what you have told us. This database is fully searchable. All of the information has been recorded in a very large amount of detail. That information is all available. It is on our database and we will be taking it with us for people to see if they would like to in the future.

We have already produced a report in one of the regions. The central region actually summarized what they heard. Any workshop participants, we recorded what they said at the workshops. We sent them back copies of it to make sure that we got it just right. So certainly this information is going to be invaluable to us both at this stage of the process and at future stages, because now we know.

In terms of where we are now, after the consultation we took all that information back and we asked each region to develop their own goals and objectives, which would be consistent with the provincial goals and objectives that were established. Then we asked them to look at every parcel of Crown land within their region and put it into one of three categories that we set up with the process.

Just in terms of how these people made their decisions, if you remember each team has all of the various resource sectors represented on it and we asked these people to come to the table and bring with them their science, their knowledge of what the government's policies and priorities were for their individual sectors, their knowledge of what their client base thought was important and hoped to see as a result of this process. They sat around the table and they discussed all of it. They put it all on the table, each interest. I think they argued a bit; in fact, I am sure they did, but generally they tried to develop a land use category for every parcel of land and generally they were able to do it through consensus.

MR. CHAIRMAN: I wonder if I could step in just for a moment, please.

MS. HARNISH: This is my last slide.

MR. CHAIRMAN: This is your last slide. I was just wondering if we could get a quick summary because I know some of the members are anxious to . . .

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MS. HARNISH: It is going to wrap it in just a minute.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you.

MS. HARNISH: At this point in time we have assigned a C1, C2 or C3 category to every parcel of land and we are taking a look to see if we have come up with that balance in terms of the various benefits that we would like to achieve. Maybe if not all of the goals can be met, is it an acceptable compromise, and with that I will turn it back to Mr. MacAulay who will wrap it up for you.

MR. MACAULAY: I have just a few slides that I think will bring it together. I think it is important to note, as Brian puts up the first slide, that the three categories, as Vicki indicated, the first one was general or multiple use. Any piece of Crown land that was placed in this would be open for any and all uses. It is not exclusive to anyone, but there was no competing or conflicting resource use identified in that Crown block given that all of the management would take place within government policies. For instance, if you were going to be managing the vegetation, you would have to apply the Forest Wildlife Guidelines and environmental standards and so on.

The second level was multiple use and adaptive resource use. This is the area that if there were resource conflicts, the properties would be placed in this arena. They would be identified as C2. The resource conflicts would be identified and the impact of management of one resource on the other would be identified. So if there were restrictions to the way a property could be managed, that would be the intent in C2, to identify what that restriction was and identify what impact it may have on provincial policy.

C3 was probably the easiest of those. Those were basically lands that were allocated for primarily a single source. Often they could have other uses, but basically they were being managed for a single source such as wilderness areas and provincial parks and so on. I gave examples there and I have gone through this relatively quickly. To enable them to develop a provincial strategy, what they really must do after they have identified all of the Crown blocks in the three categories, is to then test what the impact on all of the resources is, that balance, and identify in their strategy what the impact may be on the existing policy with respect to those uses and make recommendations to us as to how that might change or what we may have to do to balance all the resource uses.

Just very quickly, some supporting initiatives that are happening over the next two or three years that have an impact both on the results or the way the results will be implemented. Obviously, we are updating the Forest Wildlife Guidelines and we will be regulating some portions of those. We are in the process of developing a new forest code of practice under the forest strategy. The group that is now with Environment is busy preparing management plans for those protected areas. It was part of that strategy. We have new endangered species legislation and we will be developing the recovery plans for core habitat for endangered

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species. We have an interim old growth policy and will be establishing a permanent old growth policy on Crown land. We will be developing, as well, a more detailed biodiversity policy for Crown land and we will continue to map and promote our mineral resources as actively as we can.

My last slide. After we have developed the strategy we have just indicated and explained, the next step in that process would be the second level of public consultation and we anticipate that would be early in the year 2000. We would, hopefully, soon after that second phase of consultation, finalize those regional strategies and those regional strategies would then govern our local area plans which are the more detailed management activities on each of the Crown blocks.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you very much to all the presenters. Without further ado, because the committee does have some business before 10:00 a.m. to deal with, I will introduce Brian Boudreau, the member for Cape Breton The Lakes who joined us some time ago, actually, for the record. Thank you for coming. We will open up the floor now for questions. Mr. Epstein.

MR. HOWARD EPSTEIN: These were both very good presentations and very interesting. I have to say, it would be very useful if, by any chance, we could have copies at some point of the overheads. That would be a very good guide, it would be a big help.

To the extent that I have a question, it really focuses on the integrated resource management. I wonder, Mr. MacAulay, if you could help me with this because the parallel that I tend to have in mind is with municipal planning and how that is approached. It seems to me that there are probably some obvious differences between what happens in a municipality and what you have in mind for Crown lands, so I wonder if you could help me here. The first thing I wonder about is the status of what the plans will be or the strategies when you finish with them. The parallel in the municipality is that planning is done with a municipal planning strategy and then a zoning by-law that implements it and it gives people rights. I assume that isn't what is contemplated here, that essentially it is not designed to kind of give guarantees of rights to comers. This is meant, is it not, as a sort of planning guide for your own internal purposes, is that right?

MR. MACAULAY: Well, it has a fairly wide, broad, context. First, yes, there would be some differences because it is a strategy that we are developing, not a zoning by-law. Those areas that are identified in Number 3 would be given an element of protection and certainly we would want to ensure the ecological integrity of those sites. Those areas that have been identified in Number 2, all of the resource values would be identified in the strategy and in the subsequent resource maps and that would be used as a guide in our local area planning so that we don't forget or miss something. Some of the information we gathered from the public was too detailed to put on an overview or strategy but that is going to be available for planning.

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The other point that I would like to make is that our strategy is a living document. It has to be, we are dealing with natural resources. We are not dealing with a hard land base and therefore, as the information and our inventories grow, we will have to look at that strategy and continue to try to balance.

MR. EPSTEIN: From the information on the department's website, it sounds as if none of the strategies are finalized yet.

MR. MACAULAY: No, they are not.

MR. EPSTEIN: I wonder what timetable you contemplate for the three different regions?

MR. MACAULAY: I went through the slides rather quickly there but what they are doing at this time is, they have collected all of that information as indicated by Vicki, and they are wrestling with the balancing at this point and developing that strategy and trying to make recommendation with respect to provincial policy. We expect that that should take the next month or two to finish. They are getting near completion on that exercise and we expect to go back to the public for the second phase of consultation early in 2000.

MR. EPSTEIN: For all three of the districts?

MR. MACAULAY: For all three regions, yes.

MS. HARNISH: They are pretty much all now at the same level.

MR. EPSTEIN: Are you finding that the three categories are sufficient?

MR. MACAULAY: The three categories are sufficient for a regional strategy but they have subcategories on their resource maps and they are using that for a guide and a reference for future planning purposes. We are not losing that information. The subcategories in Number 2 would identify the various resource uses that have identified that area as having some ecological significance to them or some sensitivity to that resource.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Carey.

MR. JON CAREY: My question would be for Ms. Penfound. You said 7 per cent of the privately-owned parcels of land, do you have a figure of what percentage of the province, or what land mass that is?

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MS. PENFOUND: No I don't. It may be something that could be made available or could be gleaned from the information at the Department of Housing and Municipal Affairs but I don't have a percentage of land base. It is one of the weaknesses in terms of how the information has not yet been manipulated.

MR. CAREY: In my specific area, we have a fair amount of coastal property in Kings County that is being purchased quite rapidly by foreign investors, or whatever you wish to call them. I am just wondering if there is anything coming in the near future that is going to have more control. It appears that any private individual can sell the coastal property, there is no limit on amount and there is no control on the usage, as long as it is legal. I am wondering, we seem to be losing it quite rapidly, and I am not sure if that is good or bad, I am not making that statement. I am wondering if there is anything that is going to be put in place.

MS. PENFOUND: I guess what I could say to you is certainly government has committed to instituting, within its first mandate, mechanisms to allow municipalities to have a differential tax rate for non-residents. Certainly that will have an impact, somehow. The group that I spoke of, the interdepartmental group has been looking at what the possible options are, and part of that was reviewing what was happening in other provinces and part of that was suggesting ways we might get a good feeling for what the sentiments of Nova Scotians are, what do we want to do, what is happening, what controls do we want to have there.

Those are decisions for government. We have certainly come up with suggestions and what possible measures could be taken, and we are ready to respond to those. But in terms of what particular measures might be implemented, that is a policy decision to be made by government.

MR. CAREY: I just have a fear that we are falling far behind in that area.

MR. CHAIRMAN: As I pass it along, you mentioned, and to put it in question form, how do we get better information and keep it current? I would like to put that question to you because I am sure you have an answer for that.

MS. PENFOUND: Yes, we have certainly been thinking about that. I guess what I could say and did say in the presentation, we think we have better information, we just haven't used it or pulled it together to give us these answers. The assessment database that Housing and Municipal Affairs has is excellent information. There may be a small percentage of those addresses that aren't a reflection of residency, but boy, I bet you it is awful close. Compared to the weak information we have through our other source, it clearly is the place to look.

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There are probably some measures that can be undertaken very quickly; in fact, Housing and Municipal Affairs are looking at doing this very soon, that would help us right away. For example, everybody in Nova Scotia now has to file, when they record a deed, a deed transfer tax affidavit. Everybody has to do that. Why don't we just print that disclosure form on the back of that, so that it is not just a question of if your lawyer is keeping on top of this and tells you that you should file it, that they do it, some might get lost or it might not happen. Let's just make that something that before you put a deed in the registry, everybody has to declare their residency.

There are things like that that are fairly simple that could move us towards getting pretty good information about residency. Those are the kinds of things that we are on the verge of saying, we can do this and we can do this right away.

MR. CHAIRMAN: I can tell you, I looked for three years to get a shorefront property and the only way you can do it is essentially buy a property that has an existing home on it and tear down a perfectly good home to build on. Our shorefront properties are gone.

MS. PENFOUND: They are certainly at a premium.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Boudreau.

MR. BRIAN BOUDREAU: Mr. Chairman, first I would like to congratulate the group. It was a good presentation, very well presented, congratulations on that part. I have just a couple of small questions. About the upland owner, is there any responsibility to an upland owner to provide access to shoreline?

MS. PENFOUND: I guess I am probably the best person to answer that. If you are an upland owner, I guess to state it another way, if you own property along the shore, there are certain rights that come along with being a riparian owner. I am just telling you my understanding of how the law works on this. Those rights relate mostly, and we are talking about, there are a number of upland owners, you can be an upland owner along a river or a stream, you can own property or you can be a shorefront owner. I am assuming you are talking about somebody along a shoreline as opposed to along a river or something?

MR. BOUDREAU: My concern is for fishing, hunting, that sort of purpose, that ordinary Nova Scotians have access to the resources.

MS. PENFOUND: If you are an owner of land along a shoreline, you have certain riparian rights and they relate mostly to your ability to have ingress and egress to your land by water. Somebody can't come along and do something in front of your property that prevents you from using that shorefront, because then you really aren't a waterfront owner anymore if you don't have that ability to do those things.

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As an upland owner or a shorefront property owner, you don't have any obligation to let the general public cross over your land. Anything below the ordinary high water mark is owned by the Crown, so the public can walk along the shoreline between the ordinary high water mark and the low water mark, but they don't have an automatic right to access the shore over your property. There is an Act called the Angling Act that I think does give some limited right of access to people who want to go fishing.

MS. HARNISH: You can walk along the river.

MR. GILBERT: That deals more with inland waters, in terms of access across uncultivated land. It is not as pertinent to ocean frontage.

MR. BOUDREAU: My second question, Mr. Chairman.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Okay, your second one. We will try to make a round again.

MR. BOUDREAU: Do you want me to ask it now?

MR. CHAIRMAN: Go ahead, if it is a quick question.

MR. BOUDREAU: Environmental clean-up of lands. In Cape Breton your department acquired a lot of the Sysco properties. Is there any plan in place to clean up these properties, or funding - funding and a plan?

MS. PENFOUND: I don't think there is any specific plan. The former Sysco lands that we acquired, were most of the lands owned by Sysco that had nothing to do with the main steel plant in Sydney. They were properties almost all on Cape Breton Island but some in Pictou County as well. Most of those were abandoned sites. If requests come in to use those particular sites, we would address whatever issues are there, but in terms of a blanket program to go and assess all those lands and address any issues on them, no we don't have anything happening right now in terms of an organized program to do that.

MR. BOUDREAU: Many of the properties were used for such things as strip mining and that sort of thing.

MS. PENFOUND: Yes.

MR. BOUDREAU: I have one area in my constituency which is creating a lot of problems right now with garbage, stuff like that.

MS. PENFOUND: Yes.

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MR. BOUDREAU: Eventually somebody has to clean these properties up, not just in Cape Breton but in Pictou or wherever they are. You don't have a plan?

MS. PENFOUND: We don't have any long-term plan in terms of assessing all those properties. Clearly those lands, when they came to us, I guess to use the phrase my teenagers use, there are issues on that. They are lands that have a history, and that history sometimes is storied and not positive in terms of how the land has been left. No, I certainly couldn't stand here and tell you that we have a plan to deal with each and every one of those properties.

MR. BOUDREAU: Did you assess the properties? Do you have that information in the database? When you acquired them, did you assess them to see what the requirement was, to either clean them up or . . .

MS. PENFOUND: No, the properties were turned over by Sysco to the province, and we have them in our Crown land inventory of lands. We have background information provided by Sysco and access to information about what occurred on those lands. We have been dealing with various bits of those properties because many of them had ownership issues. There were a good number of people who lived in homes that were on lands that were formerly owned by Sysco, even though they had lived there for a long time, or encroachments. We have been picking away at trying to deal with those ones that affect individual persons.

In terms of developing a database or having a big plan to address any issues, no we are not doing that on a broad scale. If someone comes in and asks us to use some of the land, certainly part of the assessment that would go on - in fact this holds true of any Crown land, if someone comes in and says I would like to use this Crown land for mining or to grow blueberries there or whatever, we ask our regional IRM teams to have a look at that. Part of the process they go through is identifying any issues that are there. One that would come up would be former Sysco land, may be undermined, may have this, may have that.

That would be part of the process of the decision making in terms of what we would permit, and part of the conditions that we might put on a user would be, okay, if you are going to do x, y and z, when you are done in five years, you had better leave the land in this condition. We would take into account, insofar as we could, mechanisms through that process to do it. But, no, we don't have a big budget set aside to go and clean up all these 6,500 acres of Sysco lands dotted mostly around Cape Breton Island and Pictou County.

[9:30 a.m.]

MR. CHAIRMAN: Some of those areas we haven't had a concentrated effort in even establishing what we have there, because I know I was involved in some of the ones to plot underground workings from very old maps, particularly in the Stellarton area, going back to

[Page 27]

the mid-1800's to try to find out where the workings are and therefore identifying areas of possible subsidence. So it is quite a bit of effort to just do a study on some of these lands.

MR. JOHN MACDONELL: I will save my first question, just to make it a throwaway, since the Chairman will probably be jumping on me if I ask too many. I would like to know if it is possible to get a copy of the inventory, the regional overview, and also copies of the resource maps?

MS. HARNISH: Well certainly the inventories were made public and distributed to all participants at the time of the consultation so we have those easily available. The resource maps would be a lot more problematic, just because of the number of maps that one would have to take a look at.

MR. JOHN MACDONELL: How many would there be?

MS. HARNISH: Oh, my goodness. To actually find anything meaningful on all of those maps?

MR. MACAULAY: I think the final result of the maps would certainly be made available to everyone.

MS. HARNISH: Well, we will be putting them on file in the library, for example, at the Department of Natural Resources.

MR. MACAULAY: They certainly would be on view and available when we go on to the consultation phase in early 2000. Most of the maps they have now are works in progress. Forest inventory maps, those are available through our offices. Wetland inventory maps are available so there is a whole myriad of maps from parks, protected beaches, scenic vistas. Each agency came with a working draft of areas that they felt some importance on.

MS. HARNISH: We did place a set of the initial maps that were used at the consultations on file at the library in Founders Square. I didn't want to undertake to reproduce all of them, but they are available any time you would like to come take a look a them.

MR. JOHN MACDONELL: Well, if I could identify a couple of them, would it be possible to get copies?

MS. HARNISH: Oh, yes, we have a printer on-site.

MR.GILBERT: If you want to get in contact with me, then go over what you need, and I will do my best to accommodate.

[Page 28]

MR. MACDONELL: Thank you, Mr. Gilbert, I guess my next question is, it is shown that there are roughly 3.5 million acres of total Crown land. I am wondering if you know, in relation to other departments, because this Integrated Resource Management Plan doesn't include the Department of Transportation, the Department of Agriculture, or other departments. I am just wondering if you know of those 3.5 million acres, how many acres would be in the Integrated Resource Management Plan or under the Department of Natural Resources?

MR. MACAULAY: The acreage we gave was the acreage plan that would be included in this. We excluded from those any lands that were held by other departments.

MS. PENFOUND: If I could jump in to add perhaps something that might be helpful. In terms of the type of land the various departments have, the Department of Natural Resources has the 3.5 million acres of land. The easiest way for me to keep it in my mind is we have land that doesn't have any buildings on it. Now we own rocks and trees out there. We also administer that 3.5 million acres of dry land. We also are the department that administers and permits activity along Nova Scotia's 9,000 kilometres of coastline.

The Department of Transportation and Public Works has land that has roads and buildings. The Department of Housing has land that has been land-banked for housing development, so they aren't going to own that land long term. It is going to be turned into land for other uses. So the land that is owned by other government departments is specific to their particular mandate as opposed to the large bulk of Crown land that the public views as public land, and that is the land that Natural Resources holds and administers and that is that 3.5 million acres.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Chipman.

MR. FRANK CHIPMAN: Mr. Chairman, I don't know whether I have a question or a statement, but anyway, when you talk about non-resident landownership, I can think of an instance in my own municipality where the joint owners, through inheritance perhaps, two or three live in Ontario and the other is a resident of Nova Scotia. Taxation was brought up in this regard.

The other thing that concerns me, I guess, when we talk about non-resident landownership - and I don't want to discourage economic development in this province - I know in my area we have had foreigners, if you want to call them foreigners; I think we use those terms. Canada is a mosaic, it is a melting pot similar to the United States and we have many groups of people who have settled in this country and this province. With them they bring economic prosperity. Like I said in my area, they have built $200,000 and $300,000 homes which helps out the building supply people, carpenters, excavators and everybody gets a little kick at the can.

[Page 29]

It seems to me when you are dealing exclusively with shore frontage - maybe that is good and maybe that is bad - the resource is there, it is available to Nova Scotians, it has been there for years. The unfortunate part is, when somebody else shows an interest in it, then it becomes a hot issue. We are looking at the same thing with forest land. There are millions of acres of forest land in this province that have been available to Nova Scotians for years and yet the multinationals are paying up to $1,800 and $2,000 per acre for good forest land. That prices it out of the range of the local woodlot owner. I am not going to specify which, you can probably judge from that who I am talking about, but it is the same thing. How do you control that? Are you going to discriminate against people coming in from foreign countries or, we will say, Maritime companies that want to buy other shore land or woodland? I would like to see economic development.

The other thing, I guess, one of the major pulp and paper companies - and I think I can say this, I am not going to jeopardize my situation here - Scott Paper. I believe, and I don't know if it is Lake Chignecto or Cape Chignecto Land Holdings, but they bought a fair amount of property in this province years ago as forest land, but they have developed that. That has been sold to various groups of people, whether they are native or non-native to the province. Do you know the company I am referring to? Is it Lake Chignecto or is it Cape Chignecto?

MR. GILBERT: Cape Chignecto.

MR. CHIPMAN: Right, so there you have a foreign company - I should say Scott Paper is an American company - that came in here and acquired a fair amount of property in this province and they have excluded the lake frontage which they have developed and sold off. I notice you don't require businesses, if they are carrying on a business, to file under the disclosure Act?

MS. PENFOUND: If you are registered to do business in Nova Scotia, or you are actually carrying on your business on the land, the current Act wouldn't require that you file a statement.

MR. CHIPMAN: Anyway, I think that is all I wanted to say. Like I said, it was a statement more than a question?

MR. CHAIRMAN: Mrs. Baillie.

MRS. MURIEL BAILLIE: One of my questions has already been answered. I was wanting to know about the percentage of land that you worked with. When you are talking about recreational parks, picnic parks, the management of it, does that come under you?

[Page 30]

This is kind of personal. In my own area, the picnic parks were closed at 2:00 p.m. Labour Day afternoon, on a sunny afternoon. The people were ordered out. They came up, were told the park is closed, you have to leave. I got quite a few calls on this and I just wondered, who do I take that concern to?

MR. GILBERT: You can take it to me.

MRS. BAILLIE: Thank you very much. You will be hearing from me. (Laughter)

MR. GILBERT: Any of those types of operational concerns, if you would please give me a phone call or drop a note, I would be more than pleased to get in touch with you and deal with it.

MRS. BAILLIE: Well may I ask, was that standard this year? Were all parks closed at 2:00 p.m. Labour Day?

MR. GILBERT: I would have to check. I don't know about 2:00 o'clock, but I do know the date. I will leave my card before I leave and if you would like me to pursue that, I certainly would.

MRS. BAILLIE: The other question if the group is thinking about getting a protected area, say in Pictou County, what is the first step they do? Do they just apply to you?

MR. MACAULAY: Maybe the best way to answer that would be to go back and look at how the existing protected areas were established. We went through a considerable strategy for parks and protected areas where there was a landscape planning exercise dividing the province into 77 landscapes. All of the Crown land was viewed for its ecological significance. The group that was involved in that picked 31 sites on Crown land that they felt were the most significant from an ecological point of view, most representative from the 77 units, and they came forward with their strategy. That was the first review of that.

I guess the second part of my answer would be the process we have just described, the IRM process, where we have gone through, as we explained, a fairly elaborate process of viewing all the land. So anyone with those kinds of interests we hope would have brought it forward in the first consultation and certainly they will have another opportunity in the second consultation part of that.

MR. GILBERT: They also have an avenue, if they wanted to bring it forward at this point in time, they would take it to the local Department of Natural Resources office that would process it through the local regional IRM group and then it would come to the provincial group.

[Page 31]

MRS. BAILLIE: So if I mention a particular area to you this morning, would you know if it had been . . .

MR. GILBERT: I don't know.

MRS. BAILLIE: Okay. That is fine then. I will pass it on.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Epstein.

MR. HOWARD EPSTEIN: Ms. Penfound, can you tell me, you mentioned the LRIS database. Where is that available? Do you have to subscribe to that or can you get access to it through the Internet and, if so, where is it to be found?

MS. PENFOUND: Yes, there are a couple of ways you can do it. You can do it just in a Registry of Deeds Office. I guess they call it Land Information Office now. So if you went to Terminal Road, you could go in and sit down and do it. It also is available over the Internet, but you have to be a subscriber.

If you wanted to sometime just have a look at it, I would be happy to show you or I am sure that if you contacted the right people at Housing and Municipal Affairs - and the director there is a guy named Peter Kittilsen - they do demos all the time. They can go online and show you. It is fascinating. It is amazing. I worked at LRIS in the late 1970's, early 1980's, and all of a sudden all that stuff that we thought was going to happen, it is there. So it would be well worth your while to have a look.

MR. EPSTEIN: Okay, I may take you up on that offer. May I ask her another question?

MR. CHAIRMAN: Yes, go right ahead.

MR. EPSTEIN: I have lost track of the state of play with respect to litigation over non-resident ownership. My recollection is that there was some litigation when P.E.I. first brought in its legislation. Are there more court cases and what is the net effect of it, if you could summarize it?

MS. PENFOUND: I do not think there are any going on right now although I certainly cannot speak authoritatively about it. I do not know of any that are hot right now. I think the issue in P.E.I. had to do with this taxation thing and that is why in the end they framed their legislation so that - and I believe this is it - you tax everybody the same and then you give relief to people who live there and I think that was an outgrowth of some of the cases, but I certainly could not speak authoritatively on it. I think somewhere in my files I have some of that stuff, but I do not think there is anything hot right now before the courts on it.

[Page 32]

MR. EPSTEIN: So is the net effect that, in fact, there may be a technically allowable way to distinguish between residents and non-residents for tax purposes?

MS. PENFOUND: Yes, that is my understanding, that you can, in fact, do that. Their law is there and it is working. I think it was framed around results through the courts.

MR. EPSTEIN: Okay, we will have another discussion about this maybe at another time. Thank you very much.

MRS. BAILLIE: You do not have anything to do with private lands, do you? I am thinking about clear-cutting, reseeding.

MR. GILBERT: We have a program right now that provides assistance for people to do forestry work. We do not have any control over whether or not they clear-cut, selection cut, those sorts of things. We have guidelines in place in terms of wildlife habitat, stream integrity, that sort of thing, but the short answer to your question is, no, we have incentives.

MR. MACAULAY: I guess it is also important that I point out, in answer to that, that we are part-way through a new forest strategy, that saw amendments to the Forests Act last year, and public review on two sets of new regulations. One of the primary reasons for that was to ensure that there is sufficient silviculture being carried out on private land and a lot of the onus under those regulations is being placed on the buyers, the industry that is using it.

MRS. BAILLIE: Okay, thank you.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. MacDonell.

MR. JOHN MACDONELL: Mr. Gilbert, I would not mind - and I won't say in 10 words or less; but I would like to have - just a little background as to your role, Executive Director of Regional Services; what exactly is it that goes on there?

MR. GILBERT: I am responsible for the operational arm of the department. Under my umbrella of responsibility is the provincial air service, the radio system, the transition of it into the new system, all the field offices, the enforcement, the regional teams, fire protection, any of the where-the-rubber-meets-the-road activities of the department, the delivery; that is my responsibility.

MR. JOHN MACDONELL: I think maybe Mr. MacAuley could answer this. I had seen on one of the slides that you are developing an old grove forest policy or strategy. Could you explain where you are going with that, or what you are hoping to achieve?

[Page 33]

MR. MACAULEY: A lot of these are tied to the whole area of our commitments under biodiversity and our move to ensuring that we maintain biodiversity in the province. Certainly the protected areas are an element of that, as is our old-growth strategy. The difficulty in developing strategies with respect to old growth and protected areas is there isn't any hard science to give you any direction as to how much. Through our planning manifests, our biologists, protected area planners and so on, they have come forward with an estimate of 8 per cent old growth.

We are implementing an interim strategy at the present time that would see us try to maintain 8 per cent old growth by a landscape, the same landscapes that are used for protected areas. We are working on a more permanent one that is tied to both the biodiversity strategy and those other initiatives. In the meantime, our interim guide is 8 per cent old growth.

MR. JOHN MACDONELL: So it is 8 per cent of the 3.5 million Crown land acres?

MR. MACAULEY: Yes. That is correct.

MR. JOHN MACDONELL: Could you explain what you mean by landscape?

MR. MACAULEY: Most planning systems are based on some form of ecological classification. As part of our process, we are developing an ecological classification for the province, as we speak, one that is a higher ecosystem that will allow us to analyse all of these resource issues by one of the levels, depending on the scale, and then report on that. Some of the issues are very broad and will be reported on a very broad level, maybe a climatic zone such as biodiversity and some levels of ecological integrity. Others are very specific, a protected species, if it is a flower or something, it may be a very specific site. It would be reported at a different level.

I am not sure if that is answering your question, but one level of that is landscape. That is the one level that has been in the public view for some time now. It was developed primarily for use in the protected area strategy. It divided the province into about 77 units. That is one scale of a higher classification system. The intention of the landscape level is really to be one where you would try to manage for certain levels of old growth, biodiversity, protection and so on.

MR. JOHN MACDONELL: Thank you.

MR. CHAIRMAN: A quick question from Mr. Chipman.

MR. CHIPMAN: One is partly a statement, but I have a couple of questions. When we go back to the Land Holdings Disclosure Act, was that developed when, I think her name was Mrs. Wood, I can't remember her first name, from Ohio, I think she had around 5,000

[Page 34]

acres of land in Queens County that was expropriated by the province back in the 1960's. Was that what initiated this?

MS. PENFOUND: It may have been. I am not sure.

MR. CHIPMAN: Okay, Kerry Morash would probably know more about that. Anyway, she owned a fair amount of land out there, but I remember that coming into effect. I guess, anything on the private woodlands as far as the Canada-Nova Scotia agreement - I know that has never been renewed - but I guess what I am thinking is that there is a lot of concern today about forest over-cutting. There is a lot going on throughout the province, particularly in my area right now, and in Digby Neck there is the bark beetle which is causing a fair amount of damage. I know with silviculture, that will increase the production by one-third of a cord per acre per year. If it is done properly you can increase the wood volume.

I guess my question is, the annual allowable cut or the annual sustainable cut, do we have any handle on that at all? Does anybody actually know what the annual allowable cut is now? I know there was some concern a few years ago that we had exceeded it. How do you determine that?

MR. MACAULAY: Yes, we do have new annual allowable cut figures. We don't like to use the term annual allowable cut, you might have seen some of that in the press recently because the only area where we could provide an allowable cut is on Crown land. On private land, we have no legislation to restrict what gets harvested when. It is not allowable as such. What we do is a review of the sustainable levels. We do a supply-demand modelling. We have very recent runs which we have shared with the industry, early summer, and which will be released publicly very soon.

It clearly shows, as did the old runs, that the Crown land harvest is definitely sustainable at its current level. The industrial land, if you looked at the first chart, they are about 25 per cent each, 24 per cent, something in that range. The industrial lands are sustainable at the current levels of harvest. The main reason for both of those is that on Crown we don't harvest as much as industrial but we do supply a certain amount of silviculture which increases the productive capacity of those sites, and on industrial land there is a considerable amount of silviculture to offset the harvest and the productive capacity is there, the h-class distribution is there.

The problem is with small-private. Most of the increased harvest in Nova Scotia has happened on small-private over the last six years. It has been a fairly dramatic increase in harvest rate. It is most obvious to people because small-private tends to be the lands along roads, and woodlot owners tend to be more visible, and they are the ones that are harvesting. I think they are harvesting primarily because of the market. Again, that was one of the main reasons for the amendments to the Forest Act, the new regulations on wood sustainability. The level of silviculture that will be proposed with the new regulations will make the harvest

[Page 35]

level as it exists today sustainable on small-private. Without the silviculture that is proposed through that regulation, it is not.

If I could make one other comment. When you are dealing with sustainable levels, you are looking at harvest over a period of time, not one or two years. One or two years of spike is really not going to impact your sustainable level, but a continued use of the resource at that level may. This spike that we have had has lasted for the last four years. Four years ago there wasn't a great concern. We have had four years of accelerated harvest and it has levelled off in the last three. If the market stays hot, it may stay there for a while. With the silviculture, we are okay. If the market cools off, we may find a decline. Again, it is mostly all on the small-private side.

MR. CHIPMAN: You have a handle on the Crown lands, but what about as far as private lands?

MR. MACAULAY: To do modelling, the key components there are inventory. Our inventory which has been published again this past spring is the total inventory of the province, including private land and industrial. It is a photo-interpreted inventory on a stand-by-stand basis. We have a fair amount of confidence in the inventory. That data has been released just recently.

The second key element is good information on growth and yield. What will happen if you manage it in a certain way? What happens if you leave it? We have about 25 years of research on growth and yield under a variety of management techniques. We are very fortunate, in fact, in Canada, and I think we have excellent data and to be able to model.

We use that to model what is going to happen, taking the inventory from its current state and modelling it over a rotation. We can look at the end result of harvesting at that level, what happens to age class, what happens to configurations, and we do it based on region and on land ownership. That is why we can say it is the small-private where we have our problem.

MR. CHIPMAN: You feel certain that you have a grasp on what is going on with private, through aerial photographing, whatever, that you do.

MR. MACAULAY: Yes, we do.

MR. CHIPMAN: You don't think there is any fear of over-cutting there? There is clear-cutting, there is no doubt about that. I guess what I am talking about is sustainability there.

MR. MACAULAY: The sustainable level is there, provided the silviculture funding and the silviculture is done on the small-private at the level that is being proposed in the new regulations. Without that, that cut is not sustainable.

[Page 36]

MR. CHIPMAN: This is getting just a little off, but I know that a year ago, the Digby-Saint John ferry, 330 trailer loads of round wood left the province for New Brunswick, jobs that could have been created here. I am talking logs not pulpwood.

MR. MACAULAY: Two areas, just to answer that. Over a year ago, one of the first things in the new strategy was a Registry of Buyers. We implemented that because we had the authority under the existing Act, we didn't have to wait for the amendments. With the Registry of Buyers, we have excellent compliance. All of the buyers over 1,000 cubic meters now register, and they identify the total volume of the harvest that they have used and from where it was obtained, from small-private and from what county.

We have pretty good data, we are confident in the data, but we don't rely totally on that. We also look at satellite inventory and aerial photography and take a look at harvest. We can get an estimate of the total harvest in the province. We also have good contacts in the neighbouring provinces and states, and we monitor them quite regularly for information on what they have purchased out of Nova Scotia.

We feel we have pretty good data on the total amount of harvest. We have had for quite some time. The difficulty that we did have was that we were getting it as a lump of data so we didn't know how to divide it into small-private, large-private, industrial, and from which county. It was very difficult to manipulate. With the Registry of Buyer data, we now have that breakdown that we didn't have before, and we are much more confident.

MR. CHIPMAN: What percentage of this being harvested is on public lands, do you think is actually leaving the province unmanufactured?

MR. MACAULAY: On public land, there is almost none because we have a policy that if anyone has a lease or a licence on Crown land, to export the wood out of the province they would have to get permission from the government.

MR. CHIPMAN: I am sorry, I said public lands, referring to Crown lands, but I meant private land.

MR. MACAULAY: Approximately 10 per cent to 12 per cent of our harvest is exported. Again, that information is in the latest release of the Registry of Buyers, on the total production, which again was released this past spring.

MR. CHAIRMAN: We are going to have to call an end to the session now. We all have other commitments. You have provided us with a great deal of information that we are going to have to decipher. I certainly thank you for that. Ms. Harnish and Mr. MacAulay and Ms. Penfound - native Pictou County daughter, glad to see you here - and Mr. Gilbert, thank you for your input too. I think it is safe to say that Vanna White's job is safe. (Laughter)You have been doing a great job flipping these slides today for us. I guess you didn't realize it was

[Page 37]

a working position like that. We thank you for that, you did a fine job. We certainly appreciate you coming. I will excuse you now because the committee does have a very short bit of business that we will have to attend to before we move on.

We have a request from the Nova Scotia Forest Products Association, they wish to make a presentation to this committee. I am just wondering how you feel about that, as a committee. Would you like to put that on the schedule?

MR. BOUDREAU: Do you need a motion, Mr. Chairman?

MR. CHAIRMAN: No, just if everyone is in agreement.

Is it agreed?

It is agreed. We will add that to our list then.

The next meeting date is November 30th. We have the Nova Scotia Organic Growers Association coming in, for your information. If there is anything else you would like to add to our agenda for consideration at this time, please do so.

[10:00 a.m.]

MR. JOHN MACDONELL: The list from last year, I know our caucus had requested the Nova Scotia Sheep Producers Association. I am just wondering if that had made it anywhere.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Was that on our list this time? (Interruptions)

MRS. DARLENE HENRY (Legislative Committee Clerk): It was on the list from last year, but it wasn't added on when we had our organizational meeting this year.

MR. JOHN MACDONELL: I think I missed that meeting.

MR. CHAIRMAN: You missed the organizational meeting. I think at this time, we will follow through with what we have, what we have agreed to so far. Getting into December, what is the wish of the committee? (Interruptions) What do we have scheduled now for December?

MRS. HENRY: There is nothing scheduled in December; however, I do have the people coming in from the sewage treatment plant programs that you have on January 11th. They are booked for that.

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MR. CHAIRMAN: Would it be the wish of the committee that we finish up November 30th and start in January? Okay, then. Thank you very much.

The meeting is adjourned.

[The committee adjourned at 10:01 a.m.]