HANSARD

NOVA SCOTIA HOUSE OF ASSEMBLY

COMMITTEE

ON

RESOURCES

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

COMMITTEE ROOM 1

Federation of Nova Scotia Woodland Owners

Printed and Published by Nova Scotia Hansard Reporting Services

RESOURCES COMMITTEE

Mr. John MacDonell (Chairman)

Hon. Barry Barnet

Hon. Karen Casey

Mr. Patrick Dunn

Mr. Sterling Belliveau

Mr. Charles Parker

Mr. Wayne Gaudet

Mr. Leo Glavine

Mr. Harold Theriault

[Hon. James Muir replaced Hon. Karen Casey]

[Hon. Ronald Chisholm replaced Mr. Patrick Dunn]

[Mr. Keith Colwell replaced Mr. Harold Theriault]

In Attendance:

Ms. Jana Hodgson

Legislative Committee Clerk

WITNESSES

Federation of Nova Scotia Woodland Owners

Mr. Andrew Fedora, Executive Director

Mr. Terry Pearson, Board Member

[Page 1]

HALIFAX, TUESDAY, DECEMBER 9, 2008

STANDING COMMITTEE ON RESOURCES

1:00 P.M.

CHAIRMAN

Mr. John MacDonell

MR. CHAIRMAN: Good afternoon everyone. I want to welcome the Federation of Nova Scotia Woodland Owners. The traditional way of conducting the committee is the members will introduce themselves, then we'll have the presenters introduce themselves and you can begin - the floor is yours. We have approximately two hours and usually after the presentation, members ask questions. So use the technology as you see fit.

[The committee members and witnesses introduced themselves.]

MR. ANDREW FEDORA: I guess I'll get started. What I've done here is, I have come up with, hopefully, a brief Power Point presentation. I have a couple of copies of the presentation that I will hand around. I wasn't sure how many people would be here. I just want to give you an overview of the federation, what we're about and maybe a couple of talking points to start with. I'll jump right into it here.

I guess one of the big questions is, who are we? The organization itself was established in 2003. Basically, it came from the Primary Forest Products Marketing Board in Nova Scotia. They had a series of meetings around the province with various regional and provincial woodlot owner organizations to see if there was a need for an all-encompassing organization to help deal specifically with provincial and national issues. They decided the need was there and there was quite a bit of agreement and consensus from a lot of the other organizations.

From that, seed funding was made available and most of the organizations in the province decided to come together. There are some other organizations that decided they wanted to stay on their own, or independent, and that's perfectly fine. But we managed to haul together quite a few groups and I'll show a list of those a little bit later on.

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[Page 2]

Currently we have a little over 1,000 small private woodland owners as members. The organization - we have nine volunteer directors who are evenly distributed across the province. It's mandatory that there are three in each region - east, western, central - and that's further subdivided within each of those regions. We do have a good representation there.

In terms of full-time staff, there's myself and then we contract administrative staff or professional consultants, depending on what projects we're working on or as time is needed. Our office is located in Stewiacke - it's a nice central location so we can bounce around the province when need be.

This is just something I wanted to throw in there, a question I often come across is, what is a woodland owner? A common definition we use is, any individual or non-governmental entity who owns between 15 and 5,000 acres of forested land - excuse me, I should qualify that, that is small-private, woodland owner. The difference between woodlot and woodland - basically when this organization was formed, the people who formed it felt that the term woodland was a little more encompassing, that it gave a perception of more than just simply forestry practices, which is really what we're trying to do.

Just because you own property and it has trees on it, does not necessarily mean you're involved with forestry. That's a little discrepancy there and it can be a little bit confusing. I'm guilty myself of saying woodlot owners over woodland every now and again.

Just a few statistics on woodland owners in Nova Scotia. The province, as a whole, is 70 per cent privately owned. Of that, about 49 per cent of the province's forested land is owned by small, private woodlot owners. As you can see, it's about 30,000 - that's a ballpark figure. One of the important numbers on the bottom is about 60 per cent of our wood supply of our marketable product in Nova Scotia comes from small, private woodlots. There is an association, obviously, with the forest industry but there's a little bit more to woodlots than that. I'll go into it a little bit further later.

This is just to give you an idea of the distribution of small private woodlots. Anything in green is private forested land across the province. You can see it's quite a distribution.

Getting back to the organization itself, we have two main functions. The first is to inform and educate woodland owners on a wide variety of issues - anything that has to do with forested land, whether it's tax tips, ecological goods and services, fire suppression, finding a contractor, you name it. We try to provide them with as much information as possible. We keep them informed on any provincial, national, or even the regional and local issues that may have an effect on them.

The second part is, we do act as a lobby group and we help represent woodland owners and provide a unified voice. So when it comes to anything from government policy to major decisions by industry - just about anything that affects woodland owners - if it's

[Page 3]

something on a larger scale and there's enough interest generated from our membership, then we act on it.

The last point, which we feel is fairly important - we're non-partisan and unbiased, or as unbiased as anybody can be. What you have to appreciate is there are 30,000 small, private woodlot owners in this province and each of them have a wide variety of economic backgrounds, of philosophies, different land types. There are a lot of different folks out there, as I'm sure you're all aware. Just to use the two main examples, you have your very far environmentalists to your very far commercial-cut-and-pave sort of folks out there and everything in between.

When we tackle issues, we try to pick things that will help as many woodlot owners as possible and we provide unbiased information. So if somebody approaches us and asks - they want to commercially manage their forest, well we'd give them advice on best management practices and some insight on the repercussions of what they might be doing. We don't necessarily condemn or condone the practice itself.

[1:15 p.m.]

This is just to give you a bit of an idea of the direction that we're heading in and where we're coming from. I'll just read it out verbatim. Our vision is to provide small, private woodland owners with the tools they need to make well-informed woodland management decisions and to ensure that their rights and concerns are voiced, listened to and taken seriously.

We are helping small, private, woodland owners realize the full potential of their land by providing unbiased advice on all aspects of forest management, exploring new markets, expanding our knowledge of best management practices, paying close attention to current issues and by keeping woodland owners informed. So I think that's a nice, tidy way to sum up what we're about.

This is a list of some of the organizations that we're affiliated with. Again as I mentioned, when the organization was first created, the idea was to bring together a lot of the woodlot owner groups and other organizations that were out there. So as opposed to having one issue and 12 people pounding on each of your doors, you'd have one issue and one organization representing those persons' interests, just more of a collaborative effort.

Some of these organizations you may notice aren't specific to woodlot or woodland owners but it's a very good way for us to stay informed on what's going on out there. One of the notable ones, the Canadian Federation of Woodlot Owners, gives us a really, really broad perspective on what's going on nationally and even on an international level. Another organization, the Nova Forest Alliance, is actually an organization of organizations. This just

[Page 4]

gives us a lot of opportunity to network and make sure that we know as much as possible, what's going on out there, so we can help landowners.

That's just an idea of some of the communication efforts that we've had over the last couple of years. We have regular articles in magazines such as the Atlantic Forestry Review or Canadian Silviculture. We do a semi annual phone-in show with Costas Halavrezos on CBC Radio, the Maritime phone-in; frequently, as often as possible, contribute to most of the major newspapers in the province and we're still kind of working on our Web site. Then in terms of keeping our members informed, we use good old fashioned mail, e-mail list and phone calls.

Some of the lobby work that we've completed over the last number of years, since 2003 like the Chester Grant Fire Depot - I won't go into any great detail on any of these unless, of course, you ask questions afterwards, but we played a pretty big role in keeping that open. They were looking at closing it down, some of the local people expressed some concern about it and so we helped with that. With the federal Income Tax Act, we've been lobbying with the Canadian Federation of Woodlot Owners, trying to get a distinct category for small, private, woodlot management because as it sits now, as a small private woodlot owner, you kind of fall through the cracks. Restricted farm loss rules, or anything that you would enjoy as a small business owner, doesn't apply to small private woodlot management, even though your costs are very much the same in what you incur, and the end result is pretty much the same. As an example, trying to establish a reasonable expectation of profit is a little difficult when you only harvest trees every 30 or 40 years and so with that in mind, even though you're doing silviculture, you're building roads, putting in fire ponds and taking all these expenses, you're still heavily taxed for it.

We spent quite a bit of time with the brown spruce longhorn beetle and I apologize for the acronym, we kind of got caught up in those. We've been involved with that issue for, I suppose, the last three or four years. Myself, I sit on the Brown Spruce Longhorn Beetle Task Force which helped draft some of the newer regulations and kind of helped transition from the quarantine zone to the containment area. Again, I can field the questions on that. We had representatives at pretty much every voluntary planning meeting with concerns to natural resources over the last couple of months. We've had written submissions and we are keeping a close eye on that. Again, obviously when I look around, I see some familiar faces. We've met with as many critics, MLAs and MPs as possible just to try to get some of our concerns voiced.

One of the most recent things that we're working on is with regard to the recent changes in wetlands regulation. That was kind of a tough one for landowners to deal with. At present, the way the regulations are structured, there are a lot of ambiguities in there in terms of what is classified, or deemed as a wetland, and what is not a wetland. I mean, there's no minimum size so it could be something the size of this piece of paper. In terms of species composition and so on and so forth, it's really not clearly defined. Now, the issue with that

[Page 5]

is that it's a reverse onus so if you are deemed to have a wetland on your property, you have to prove otherwise that it is indeed not, and the cost of having consultants come in, I mean you're looking at thousands of dollars. There are quite a few other issues associated with that as well but for the sake of this I'll just keep rolling along here.

Some of the projects that we have been working on or have worked on include the woodland owner conference series - we've had a tremendous amount of success with that over the last three years. We chaired the provincial steering committee. There's a conference hosted in each eastern, western and central Nova Scotia every year and it has everything to do with owning a woodlot, whether it's in blueberry production, or Christmas trees, or tax tips, and so on and so forth. We've had quite a bit of success with those. We get a lot of landowners and so it's a good way for them to stay informed with what's going on.

We did a research project in partnership with Acadia University on the watercress protection and wildlife habitat regulations, specifically landowner opinions, and we have quite a bit of information on that. Riparian silviculture is a program that we have devised and actually I have a couple of copies here, I can pass these around to you because I'm not going to go into great detail on this right now but I would like for you to have a copy. Some of you already do have a copy of it.

The proposal itself was written a little over a year ago. The first couple of pages in it kind of give you an idea of what we're trying to achieve with that, and obviously it would have to be updated if the proposal actually did come through, but essentially what we're looking at is the current regulations with the watercress protection and wildlife habitat. They require that you leave a 20-metre buffer zone along watercourses if you're carrying out forestry activity.

Now, our argument is that within those regulations they do nothing to address the quality or vigour of the riparian zone that is left. So you could leave 20 metres of raspberry bushes, or dead and dying balsam fir, and that's considered to meet the requirements. What we would like to see is a program to help enhance riparian zones, which from our point of view, again, is one of those middle of the road sort of projects where it would benefit environment, woodlot owners, nature enthusiasts and industry - industry in terms of creating employment and allowing people to operate in these areas. With environment, you're protecting water quality and the list goes on. So there's quite a bit of information there and I'd be more than willing to talk about it at great length.

Small private woodlot certification - I'm not sure, I'm hoping, anyway, that most of you are aware that we received some funding from the Department of Natural Resources to develop and implement a small-private woodlot certification program in Nova Scotia over the course of the next three years. We're very, very proud of that accomplishment and, again, I'll go into more detail on that later, if asked.

[Page 6]

Ecological goods and services - that's something that ties into riparian silviculture. The idea is that basically, as a woodlot owner, you incur many costs managing your woodlot, and there's ever-increasing pressure from society - you know we're seeing this trend toward green and people want you to be doing more and more to protect our natural environment.

Now as a landowner, whether it's in Nova Scotia or anywhere else, for you to manage your property in that fashion, I mean you have a wide variety of costs, whether its foregone revenue from not harvesting trees, in some cases you have a higher tax rate, just doing silviculture prescriptions and so on and so forth and that's a cost that you incur, yet society as a whole benefits from it. So the idea behind ecological goods and services is the valuation determine how much people value these services and what, if any, assistance programs could be available. That's a rather broad concept and I'll keep on moving from that.

I'll just sum it up here. Basically we're here to help Nova Scotia's woodland owners. There's no shortage of issues out there. We try, like I say, to focus on middle-of-the-road issues. Our main focus at present is dealing with the wetland regulations or riparian silviculture proposal certification in the voluntary planning process.

So I went a little bit longer than I expected, but I guess we're open for questions.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Parker.

MR. CHARLES PARKER: Well thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you Andrew - and Terry, I'm sure we'll be hearing from you as well.

I guess woodland ownership is something that is near and dear to my heart - and not only as the critic for the Official Opposition, but because I am a woodlot owner.

I want to, first of all, ask you about your organization. You started in 1993 or 1994, was it, somewhere around that area? What does it cost to become a member and what are the obligations, I guess, on the individual once they're signed up as a member?

MR. TERRY PEARSON: It costs $20 to become a member and that makes you a member for life. It sounds a bit strange, but we started off with an annual dues system and we found that it was very difficult and very expensive to administer, so we have adopted this system. We're not necessarily happy with it, but it works.

As far as obligations are concerned, there's not much obligation on the part of the members; the obligation is really on the part of the board to formulate policy and take it to the annual meeting to be implemented by the general membership.

MR. PARKER: Okay, what communication is there with the members? I know you are lobbying all the time, you put on the woodland conferences every year in the different

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regions. But is there a newsletter or is there some communication of any type with the membership or not?

MR. PEARSON: We're just starting our newsletter for our membership. We have an e-mail list for our members but apparently many of our members do not have e-mail, they're not connected to the Internet. So we are looking for a more effective way to reach them and we are starting a newsletter, and we're in the process of doing that right now.

MR. PARKER: Okay. You mentioned, Andrew, just a minute ago there that just recently - I think it was mid-November - you got some money for certification to help individual woodlot owners. I know there's several - six or more - different types of certification. I think yours is CSA, and NewPage, Eastern Counties has FSC, and there are a whole lot of others. I wonder if you can tell us the difference between the various types of certification and why you chose the one you did and why perhaps NewPage has a different one?

MR. FEDORA: Just to clarify that right off the bat - NewPage accepts CSA wood equally. They don't care, that satisfies their markets, so it's not just FSC wood they're concerned about. There is a wide variety of certification programs out there and there is a wide variety of types of certification. You can have your mill certified; you can have your contractor certified. What we are concerned with is with small- private woodlot certification, and within that realm there are two basic systems: there is the FSC system and the CSA Z804 system. Basically, when certification initially came out, it was around 1992, a lot of the systems that were created had industry in mind specifically. What they didn't address or didn't account for was the management of small- private woodlots. These systems were quite onerous in terms of cost and third party auditors and the paper trail you needed. It wasn't feasible.

[1:30 p.m.]

The first people to look at this were the FSC, which is the Forest Stewardship Council, and they decided to try to adapt their system to encompass small- private woodlot management. Early on, when the system was being created, the Canadian Federation of Woodlot Owners played quite a leading role with it in Canada - and you have to appreciate this is an international system and there are little tweaks just in terms, based on geography, legislation, and so on and so forth, in different countries.

The Canadian federation played a role in helping to develop the FSC program. At the time, they didn't feel the direction it was going in then that it would benefit woodlot owners so they decided to start from scratch and bring in folks from environment, academia, industry and so on to create another system. The other reason they decided to do that is because they felt there should not be a monopoly on forest certification - there shouldn't be just one entity organization out there. Landowners should have choice.

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I don't feel, personally, one system is any better or worse than the other. If anything, over the years you've seen a trend where the standards and regulations are almost becoming on par with each other. If you look at FSC when it started, a lot of the things they expected landowners to achieve were unachievable so their standards started to come down. With what was initially the pan-Canadian, which turned into the CSA standard, you've seen them raise the bar continually.

MR. PARKER: Okay, so what's the procedure, then, if a woodlot owner wants to consider certification? I guess they would contact your office and then do you come out to their woodlot and look at it, or how does it flow along towards certification?

MR. FEDORA: Well, that's the basic concept behind it - there's a set criteria or a standard as to what is acceptable on how you manage your woodlot. The criteria that was chosen, the CSA standard was based on the Canadian Council of Forestry Ministers - they have a set criteria for sustainable forest management.

It's a basic auditing process, much the same as you would have PricewaterhouseCoopers that actually do audits for it. You have a management plan for your property, you adhere to it and you follow everything that is outlined within the certification program, and then a third party auditor comes in to verify that you indeed are doing what you are supposed to be doing on your property.

MR. PARKER: Okay. I have a couple other little questions I'd like to ask, Mr. Chairman.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Yes. One more.

MR. PARKER: In the handout we got, there was a section that caught my eye around the landowner liability, and there's a law here in the province - Nova Scotia Occupiers' Liability Act - I had never heard of it, but apparently landowners can be liable for certain things, people walk on their lands, trespass on their land, has that ever been brought to bear? If there's a danger on somebody's property and somebody gets hurt because of it - can you tell us anything about that? I'm not aware of it.

MR. PEARSON: I've never heard of a prosecution under that law. I haven't read the law so I can't really tell you what it says. I never heard of a prosecution under that law.

MR. PARKER: But it does exist. It's on the books, I guess.

MR. PEARSON: Generally speaking. I'm not a lawyer but I understand that if someone comes onto your property and suffers an accident that might be construed as your fault, you are liable. That's why people have liability insurance.

[Page 9]

MR. PARKER: Can you give us an example of a danger out there that a landowner would be held liable for?

MR. PEARSON: Well, we live in a pretty litigious society. It could be somebody falling into a brook and drowning or something.

MR. PARKER: Okay, I'm just debating whether it's an act of nature, I guess, but there are brooks, there are trees. I can see if there was something specifically set up to cause a danger, but natural causes doesn't seem to be - but like you said, nobody has ever been charged.

MR. PEARSON: I've never heard of it, although there are cases where ATV riders and snowmobile riders have run into cables and chains stretched across roads.

MR. PARKER: We've all heard of that one.

MR. PEARSON: There may have been prosecutions under that law but I'm not sure.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Before I go to Mr. Glavine, Mr. Chisholm, did you have a comment you wanted to make?

MR. LEO GLAVINE: The time is short, if you want to go ahead, certainly . . .

HON. RONALD CHISHOLM: No, I'm the only one here so I'm going to make a phone call afterwards and see if I can't get out of a meeting, or delay a meeting that I have at 2:15 p.m. Anyway, I thought there was some legislation that went forward here a few years back that the liability - if you did everything reasonably possible to protect your rights and your property, that you couldn't be held liable. If you had a cable across the road and there was flagging tape and all that sort of thing on it, nobody could sue you because of that. Now I'm just going back from memory but I think it was a few years back that there was somewhere around the time of the ATV, in that area, in that time frame, that went forward. I just don't know the details but I think there's something there to protect.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Glavine.

MR. GLAVINE: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and thank you Andrew and Terry for coming in today. Very timely, in my view, in light of what is happening in the forestry sector right now. Lots of times during times that are tough, you wonder what small woodlot owners can be doing, and should be doing, as they plan for the future and for when demands on their product will become strong again. So there may not even be the same amount of monies available for silviculture this year.

[Page 10]

For example, I had a call recently from Peter Gubbins who has been very much involved in the North Mountain Woodlot Owners Association and very concerned about the program which was announced in October, 2007, for the 2007-08 year, 2008-09, because of the way in which the funds have had an uptake through the credit system, in fact there may be some real deficits of those monies available for silviculture this year. Is that a real picture, that they are concerned and some of the processes that have gone on, in fact, may hinder what they would be able to do this year? Could you just give us a little better sense, since you're dealing with these woodlot owners?

MR. FEDORA: Yes, the short answer - there is going to be a deficit in silviculture funding. For of those of you who may not be aware of how the program is structured, there are two sources of funding for silviculture in the province and I'm going to keep it as basic as possible. As a registered buyer, for every cubic metre of wood that you extract or purchase from the forest, you are obligated to do one of two things: implement a silviculture program or put the funding into what is called a Sustainable Forestry Fund. So the amount of silviculture funding that is available is directly proportionate to the amount of wood that is harvested in a given year. The rate at which, how can I explain it - for each cubic metre, we'll say, for softwood as an example, is deemed three credits which the industry has equated to $3 per cubic metre of silviculture work. So let's say, for example, for that cubic metre, okay, sorry, there's a schedule or structured system that says, okay, this particular treatment is worth a certain amount of credit value, this particular treatment is worth a certain amount of credit value. So let's say, for example, that it costs a mill two out of three credits to do a hectare of a pre-commercial thinning. They're still getting the three credit value for the work that's completed.

So for the first couple of years when the program was administered, the mills are actually saving or making money off it because the amount of silviculture work that they were required to do, they could get it done at a cheaper rate. What's happening now is the cost per unit of silviculture work is increasing so now it's costing the mill $4 to get those same three credits. So a lot of these mills are quite up in arms about this because it's just an added cost of doing business. So there's less funding available in the long term.

The sustainable forestry fund, the other avenue which is where the uneven aged management silviculture funding came from last October - to date, I believe there was one registered buyer who actually put funding in that program and every other registered buyer ran their own program. So since I believe 2000, the provincial government has been putting funding into this program to allow landowners or contractors - anybody who's interested - to do silviculture work on private land. That number varies from year to year. Sometimes there's a $1 million budget. Sometimes it's $200,000. Where that funding comes from largely depends on the provincial government of the day who's in power and how much they decide is worth putting in there but even at that, I mean a $1 million budget, you're looking at, I think there's about $12 million annually that's spent on silviculture province-wide, a

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ballpark. So it's a rather small portion of funding and so it's not really well distributed. I'm not sure, does that give you any clarity on your question?

MR. GLAVINE: Yes, the whole credit system and so on is a tough one. I was wanting to really drive at trying to answer somebody like Peter's question who, you know, has had at least a 25 year to 30 year involvement with woodlot management and with the North Mountain Woodlot Owners Association. So he has been looking at some bigger picture, you know, thinking as well. In other words, is there a real good chance that he won't be able to do the same level of work this year in terms of silviculture is what I'm asking, based on what we have been doing with this funding?

MR. FEDORA: Based on what has been going on with the funding, yes, I would say there will be less silviculture work done in the province.

MR. GLAVINE: Right, yes. So when you have a time like this, however, what in your view should at least some, or ideally all, of the woodlot owners still continue to be doing, even though harvest and fibre demands may not be at the same level as what we have seen traditionally in the province?

MR. PEARSON: I'm glad you raised that. I think paradoxically, at a time when the forest industry is so depressed, that's the time when government assistance can really be most critical. For example, right now we are starting to lose forestry professionals. Because there's no work for contractors, they are taking jobs elsewhere in the country and they're going into different lines of work. If they become established in those lines of work, we're going to lose them permanently so that when the industry recovers, which it will, we may be very short of industry professionals and that's going to be a bad situation.

It used to be that there was money available for management plans and for assistance for road construction, and those programs are largely gone because government needed the money for other things.

If the government is now thinking about stimulating infrastructure projects, this would be a place to look, I think.

MR. GLAVINE: Andrew, with your work with the small woodlot owners, has the credit system been working fine or do you think some review of that system is at a good juncture to be taking a look at?

MR. FEDORA: I think the system definitely should be reviewed. It is one of the top silviculture systems in Canada, but there are still quite a few flaws with it, in my opinion.

As an example, the program is predominately industry run. Aside from the less than $1 million a year the Association for Sustainable Forestry has to administer, if you want

[Page 12]

silviculture work done on your property, you have to go to a mill. A lot of mills, they've done a few things - I can't blame them, it makes good business sense for them - there are some mills who will say, we will not do silviculture work for you because you've never sold us a stick of wood, start sending wood our way and maybe we'll do some work for you. That's a bit of an issue, the program itself is used as a bargaining chip and there are a lot of people that have been promised funding and then they're told that things are tight this year, we can't do the work for you this year.

[1:45 p.m.]

Another issue is, there's nothing within the program that states that you have to do the silviculture work anywhere near where you extracted the wood. You could be fleecing the Highlands of Cape Breton and doing all you silviculture work around Liverpool. As a landowner who might be selling their wood in northern Cape Breton, you have absolutely no access to silviculture funding at all. Because, aside from NewPage, I can't think of any registered buyers in that area.

Access itself - that's a really big issue for your average woodlot owner; they just simply access the funding. A lot of the funding ends up going to preferred contractors. Again, it makes good business sense to have three or four contractors as a large mill that you deal with and they run your silviculture program. But what that does is, it really leaves landowners out in the cold. In that sense, those are just two smaller points, I guess, in the program.

In terms of sustainability, is the program really creating sustainable forests in Nova Scotia? I suppose it depends on what you're trying to sustain. It is an industry program and all the treatments that are funded which have the most credit value, are geared towards intensive forest management. But if Nova Scotia is looking in the direction of a more diverse forest, trying to use that program to promote uneven-aged management or restoring Acadian forest types, I don't see how that would actually ever fit in there, the program itself would have to be changed substantially.

MR. GLAVINE: I have time for one last question. Earlier this Fall, the provincial government announced they were investing $2.52 million over three years through the Community Development Trust Fund. When something like that is being developed, would your organization be asked in any kind of consultative or directional manner to say how that could be best used?

MR. FEDORA: That in itself was a bit of an exceptional circumstance, just given where the funding came from. It was more of an endowment as opposed to coming out of general funding.

[Page 13]

We are consulted from time to time from senior bureaucrats from the Department of Natural Resources. In this case in particular, we weren't asked, how do you think we should spend this funding, but that is the same fund that is funding our certification program. So, I suppose there's a bit of a connection there.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Before I go on, we've had an additional member. Mr. Muir, if you'd like to introduce yourself for the committee.

HON. JAMES MUIR: Yes, Jamie Muir, I'm the MLA for Truro-Bible Hill and I do apologize for coming in a bit late. Unfortunately, we have some people in various parts of the globe and one of the committees which I actually chair, we had a special meeting scheduled at 12:30 p.m., so.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you, glad you could make it. Mr. Gaudet.

MR. WAYNE GAUDET: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I just want to basically continue on this silviculture budget, recognizing there are limited funds. I'm just trying to get a better understanding, in terms of how does one go about accessing some of this funding? Did I hear earlier that a woodlot owner has to go through a sawmill in order to get some funding?

MR. FEDORA: Yes, absolutely.

MR. GAUDET: You can't apply through the department, you can't apply through your association - you have to go through the sawmill?

MR. FEDORA: Well, there are two avenues; there's the sawmills, which is the most dominant and that's where the vast majority of the funding is, and then there's the Association for Sustainable Forestry which, as I mentioned, that was the avenue. As a mill, you have the option of running your own silviculture program or putting equivalent funding into the sustainable forestry fund.

Now the mills, it's a no-brainer for them. They get 10 per cent off the top for administration and it's a bargaining chip for them. It makes perfect sense for them to run their own silviculture program. So what the Department of Natural Resources has done over the years is they basically injected funding that, as I say, is in the ballpark of maybe about $1 million a year into this program to keep it going. It is an avenue for landowners to receive funding. But even at that, it's extremely difficult and I'm sure you can speak to this as well. There are people lining up at 4:00 a.m. or 5:00 a.m. at the office, just waiting to have their application accepted to get funding. It's on a first-come, first-served basis.

Typically speaking, you see a lot of the funding spent in Central Nova Scotia just simply because they have the highest concentration of contractors and mills and it's pretty difficult for somebody from down in Meteghan or St. Peter's to access it.

[Page 14]

MR. GAUDET: That was my next question. What happens in my part of the world, Digby County, where you have Comeau in Meteghan, you have Irving in Weymouth - they've shut down - and some private woodlot owners from home send their wood to Bowater Mersey in Liverpool? So you basically shop around, who can offer you the best price in town?

MR. PEARSON: If I could just speak to that a bit. I have applied for silviculture funding to both the ASF and to a large mill and, as Andrew has already pointed out, the interface there is quite different. If you apply to ASF it's a first-come, first-served system, which is not necessarily the best system on which to operate in this kind of a system, in this kind of a project. There's really little or no attention to the merit of the application, it's when it got there.

With Abitibi Bowater - I can't speak to any other mill - they haven't told me this but they have said things that suggest to me that what they do is they take the money that is allocated for silviculture and spend it on their own property. If they finish all their projects and have money left over, they'll offer it to their outside suppliers, that is the private suppliers. So then you can apply to them and they'll either fund it, if they have money left over, or they won't. That's how it works with them.

MR. GAUDET: The obvious question that comes to mind, you've mentioned that most of this funding is spent in Central Nova Scotia - now why isn't that funding pretty well distributed equally around the province?

MR. FEDORA: They tried, actually I sat on the board of directors of the Association for Sustainable Forestry for a couple of years. One really big issue with the program, whether it's going through the ASF or going through the mills, is that most landowners have never even heard of the Registered Buyers Program - they don't even know that there is any funding available. So with the ASF, they never really did aggressive marketing of the program.

As Leo mentioned, there is funding that was available last Fall for a specific type of silviculture work and they put maybe $70,000 into an outreach program and all of a sudden they saw that the amount of funding uptake go up quite dramatically. So I think where traditionally central Nova Scotia seems to be sort of the Mecca of forestry, when you get to eastern and western, not as many landowners are aware of what's going on.

MR. GAUDET: I have two quick questions. Is the federation pleased with this current system, how this funding is being distributed and, if not, has the federation made a presentation or brought this to the Minister of Natural Resources?

MR. PEARSON: I will let Andrew speak mostly to this but I would just say that my own experience with applying for funding from the Association for a Sustainable Forestry

[Page 15]

has been a difficult one and I have to qualify something I said earlier. I said that the applications are not considered on merit but they're considered on the time when they arrive. That's not quite true. The applications are first of all taken on a first come, first served basis but then they have a professional forester who goes out into the forest and looks at the proposed cut and decides if it's worth funding or not. She makes that decision and then it either goes ahead or it doesn't.

In my view, that application process, and the way that money is allocated, needs to be changed. I think from looking around at woodlots that are surrounding mine, it would be nice to have some more money in that fund. Of course, it's always nice to have more money but I think this is really a serious need.

MR. GAUDET: My last question, Andrew, if I heard you correctly, you said there were over 30,000 woodlot owners in Nova Scotia?

MR. FEDORA: Yes.

MR. GAUDET: But we only have about 1,000 in the federation?

MR. FEDORA: Yes.

MR. GAUDET: Is the federation in the process of recruiting, trying to get more members to join?

MR. FEDORA: Absolutely. You have to appreciate a couple of things. I mean the organization itself first received funding - well, it was actually 2005 when we received the first operating grant - so as an entity where we can actually print off fancy little pamphlets and so on, it has only been a couple of years that we've been around. We are actively recruiting people, it just takes some time.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Belliveau.

MR. STERLING BELLIVEAU: Mr. Chairman, my question is basically a two part question if I can go into a little detail here.

To me, it is the demand for wood products. For instance, my observation is in the last decade, or the last five years, we have seen a lot of people move towards these pellet stoves and I think the pellet is an inferior product, yet it's in great demand. We see that price almost double in the last year or two and I guess my first question is, is that something that we may be overlooking? Is our potential, when we see the mills close - and they close in communities around Nova Scotia - is there something being missed here that we can't make that product in Nova Scotia? My observation is there's a lot of people moving towards this particular product.

[Page 16]

The second part of the question is - the demand for firewood in homes and this is just real old-fashioned firewood here. It was interesting today as I drove down here, people along the street selling their wares at the shopping malls, and I actually saw the guy, with a trailer, with one-quarter of a cord of wood for sale. It was light bulb time for me because usually, traditionally, we could all go in our back pasture and cut this wood. So are we moving towards a time when we're going to be restricted - your numbers are saying that 70 per cent of Nova Scotia woodlands is privately owned - so is the consumer going to have difficulty getting access to firewood to heat his home? That's the second part of the question.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Fedora.

MR. FEDORA: Sure. In terms of bio-energy and wood pellets, yes, we do have the capacity. I mean there's no shortage of wood fibre in our forests. There's the Atlantic Bio-Energy working group. I know some of the regional economic development agencies are looking at different projects. You have already in place Enligna, which was MacTara. You have Shaw who are producing pellets. One of the major disconnects there is how much they're willing to pay for logs versus what you see on the market. When you go down to Home Depot and you see a rather hefty price tag on your little bag of pellets, I think landowners are getting something like $27 a ton - yes. That is not enough to convince me to go out and start harvesting my wood and get into bioenergy. So you really do - that is one of the main stumbling blocks in production in Nova Scotia, that you have to see higher prices for that wood volume.

We have all the pieces of the puzzle and there is potential for everybody to benefit. It's just where this market and these concepts really have only blown up in the last couple of years. It's almost like somebody took the puzzle and just threw the box and the pieces down in front of you and you're slowly trying to put things together.

Yes, we have the capacity. In my view, the best way for it to work would be to have smaller production plants set up throughout Nova Scotia. I mean you'd be creating more work, province-wide, and distribution would be easier. I know in some of the Scandinavian countries, they have it set up very much like you would get oil delivered - you have a hopper in your back yard and once a month, or however often, the pellet truck shows up and dumps it in. So all the technology is available, it's just a matter of working out the economics of it.

[2:00 p.m.]

MR. PEARSON: When the price of oil spiked, the price of heating oil spiked, there was a huge run on firewood for domestic heating and everybody who had any sold out. Most of the suppliers now are digging wood out from under snow drifts, trying to prepare some. It's not in very good condition, prices have gone up, supply has gone down. So that's where we are on the firewood market right now. Did that address your question?

[Page 17]

MR. BELLIVEAU: In part, but I think - is there potential to see a scarcity of opportunities for the local person to have access to- not private land but is there going to be a shortage of land that may be available? Like Crown land, for instance? To me, there's a potential there for people who want to heat their home by firewood, who don't have access to it, is there going to be a problem in the future?

MR. PEARSON: So the real question is, can private landowners supply that demand?

MR. BELLIVEAU: Yes.

MR. PEARSON: And if they can't, will the Crown take over?

MR. BELLIVEAU: Yes.

MR. PEARSON: I couldn't answer the second part but so far, at least, private suppliers can supply the market. Prices go up, of course, when demand rises and that's what we've seen recently. I don't know of anyone who wanted firewood this year and couldn't buy it.

MR. FEDORA: It's kind of tricky to predict. One of the things that Terry mentioned earlier was with the shrinking labour force within the forest industry, there aren't as many people out there who can safely and effectively run a chain saw. You don't see as many small, private woodlot owners going out to their back forty and cutting firewood; they have contractors come in. So if you see a depletion of your workforce and your skilled folks, then I would assume that you'd see a lower production in firewood.

It is interesting that you mention the Crown, I just wanted to bring up that there was a point where you could actually apply for a permit and go into, whether it was Stora land or Bowater or whatever, that was actually managed and you could go in and extract all of the hardwood and they abolished that. That's - well, I'm not going to go off on a tangent on Crown land about access.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Chisholm.

MR. CHISHOLM: I think there's still some areas in the province where you can get those permits. I know down on the Eastern Shore, where there's no real contractors to supply hardwood, that they still can get a permit on Crown land, to cut hardwood. So that's ongoing.

The issue of the small, private woodlot certification, I'm still not really clear on that. What does that do for me, if I'm a small woodlot owner - what is it, above 15 acres?

MR. PEARSON: I think the impetus of this demand for certification comes from foreign markets, but particularly Europe, where buyers are insisting that wood come from

[Page 18]

forests that have been managed to a certain standard. So if we want to sell into that market, we have to comply with that standard, hence, the certification.

MR. CHISHOLM: Okay, now I gotcha.

MR. FEDORA: Yes, it has been market-driven right from square one.

MR. CHISHOLM: The other issue, too, I see in your affiliations here that you belong to the Forestry Safety Society. Can you give me some information on that? I know the forestry industry has really come a long way on their accident ratios. What is the Forest Safety Society and has that society made a big impact on the safety, the injury-accident ratio that we have in the province?

MR. FEDORA: In my opinion, it has helped out greatly. Basically it was kind of an offshoot from the Forest Products Association of Nova Scotia. They saw two things: one, there were quite a few injuries within the forestry industry, and the other is that it's hitting the pocketbook. I mean your workers' compensation rates were going up quite a bit. So they decided to take a proactive approach and create the Forestry Safety Society.

Essentially any forestry-related company, whether you're a contractor or a mill owner or you make boxes, a portion of what you pay into Worker's Compensation goes into funding the Forestry Safety Society. The society itself puts on a whole host of courses, whether it's chain saw safety maintenance, or lockdown procedures, or operating a crane - a whole host of things. They created the safety culture and put out quite a bit of literature and they worked very closely with the Workers' Compensation Board over the last couple of years to see exactly what they would have to do, anything from actual safety procedures, to streamlining what it is that you have to do to deal with WCB, because that can be difficult at times. So yes, essentially, the name kind of implies what it does.

MR. PEARSON: Part of the reason for the drop in serious accidents in the forest is related to changes in the harvesting technique. Most of the accidents that used to happen involved somebody with a power saw and either a tree fell on him or he cut himself. Very, very few workers in the woods now are handling a power saw as it's mostly done by harvesting machines - one man sitting in the cab doing the work of 30.

MR. CHISHOLM: I saw a presentation here a few weeks back from the Workers' Compensation Board that indicated the lower rates in the forestry sector now and they did mention that as well, that there's a lot of mechanization in the forestry. I know that the department that I have, Fisheries - it's another hazardous workplace so the rates in the fishery are very high. We're trying to do something to eliminate that, to get those rates dropped down as well. But anyway, thank you very much.

MR. PEARSON: You're welcome.

[Page 19]

MR. CHAIRMAN: I know some members may have had - I know, Mr. Parker, you're chafing at the bit. I'd like to ask a couple of questions before I start the second round. I'm curious about the - your handout here says, who are we? The minister indicated Forestry Safety Society, but you also have Forest Products Association, Nova Scotia Board of Directors listed as members. So I'm curious, in your comments about sustainability fund, when you go to a mill for silviculture work - I think they're called stewardship agreements, am I wrong on that? It's been a while since I did the Natural Resources portfolio but certainly I remember questioning the minister more than once. I think there was a deadline when registered buyers had to put money into the sustainability fund so when we checked on that deadline there was $500, I think, in the sustainability fund, which made me think there wasn't much money going there.

When you talked about the cubic metres, it's a different amount for softwood and hardwood, if I understand, that the mills have to put toward the sustainability fund, or stewardship agreement. But if I was a landowner and I was selling wood to a mill - correct me on the amount - for softwood, what would it be - $1.00-something per cubic metre? What does it work out to?

MR. FEDORA: In terms of your commitment?

MR. PARKER: Yes. My commitment and the mill's commitment, it's the same, isn't it?

MR. FEDORA: Yes, well theoretically, I guess, it all depends on your point of view. How the system is structured is the funding, it is $3.00 per cubic metre for softwood and I think it is $1.40 or $1.60 for hardwood. Theoretically it's a cost-sharing of thirds so one-third comes from the province, one-third comes from industry and one-third comes from the landowner.

MR. CHAIRMAN: It would seem to me that if I were a landowner and I was selling wood to the mill, I wouldn't really know that I wasn't paying it all in a sense that if the mill is supposed to contribute a third and I'm supposed to contribute a third and they say they're going to pay me so much a cubic metre for my wood, I would have no way of knowing that my price incorporates the whole amount.

MR. PEARSON: Your invoice will show that they took the money off.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Yeah, but in the real world when it gets processed and milled and sanded, there's no way - they could put it on paper, but there's really no way for me to know that I didn't cover both thirds.

MR. FEDORA: Absolutely.

[Page 20]

MR. CHAIRMAN: You mentioned about best forestry practices and you don't have a bias, really, in what those are. Can you tell me four things that would be best forestry practices, that you would deem to be best forestry practices?

MR. FEDORA: Your best management practices, following your provincial and federal regulations - that's a key one. Something as simple as keeping your forwarder or your porter out of brooks - you really shouldn't be changing your oil there anymore, which was a standard practice back in the day. Respecting riparian zones, actually leaving substantial buffers and wildlife clumps. I guess, in a sense, we are going to be - once we implement our forest certification program, we'll be a little more biased toward sustainable forest management because that's what the program implies. Being a good neighbour - leaving aesthetic buffers so as not to really bother the folks in your neighbourhood.

There are any number of things. Basically what we look at is, what do you want to accomplish on your woodlot and what are the best management practices.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Are the practices written down somewhere?

MR. FEDORA: Yes.

MR. CHAIRMAN: You can't argue with the legislation. If you legislate to keep a buffer or along a stream, I think we tend to think you're probably legislating not to dump your oil in the stream. The things that are not necessarily legislated, like aesthetics, as far as your neighbour is concerned, I don't think there's a law that says you must allow - other than, don't cut down a survey line. You kind of said two different things. You said things that we think are nice things to do and then there are things you have to do.

I was thinking more along the practices - not necessarily legislated because you don't have an argument there.

MR. FEDORA: Sure, okay, well the most common piece of advice I give to a woodland owner when I'm approached - hi, I'm so and so, I have 200 acres of land and I want to do something to it - it's a question I get quite often. I recommend that you pay attention to your property. Have a woodlot management plan done, have a consultant come out and just look at what's there.

If you find an area on your property that is diseased, if you have a bug infestation or very, very over mature where it could have a serious impact on your forest and your neighbouring forest, then you might want to do a sanitation harvest. You might want to pay attention to species at risk and be aware of what's there and plant appropriately around those. Invasive alien species such as the brown spruce long horned beetle or if you get into beech scale or Dutch elm, a whole host of things.

[Page 21]

Just manage accordingly so pay attention to your woodlot, see what's going on there. If you notice something that is unhealthy, then act on it. It's common sense and to me that satisfies your environmentalist requirements and it also satisfies your practicality. If you've invested in a woodlot, you should take care of it. To me, it's like if I bought a house, I wouldn't just let it sit and rot and fall apart. If I noticed some work needed to be done to it, then I would act accordingly.

MR. PEARSON: Could I add to that?

MR. CHAIRMAN: Sure.

MR. PEARSON: Operate your machinery in such a way that you don't cause siltation of streams and lakes, watercourses. Protect the boggy areas on your woodlot, leave some large dead trees for the birds that like to eat the insects that live in there - woodpeckers. And, if you're having silviculture done, tell the contractor you're not looking for monoculture, you don't want it all red spruce, you'd like some of this and some of that. So leave a balance of species in the woods.

MR. CHAIRMAN: But is that written down anywhere?

MR. PEARSON: No, you don't have to do that. If you had to do that, there would be no such thing as a plantation.

MR. FEDORA: It's not legislated but Nova Forest Alliance does have a best management practices manual out there that is accessible to landowners and we do provide advice to that extent as well.

MR. CHAIRMAN: I don't want to monopolize the time, so I guess my last thing would be from everything we've kind of heard and discussed so far, it sounds more like a Woodlot Owners Association than a Woodland Owners Association. So it hasn't really been clear from everything that you've said that you're any different from the Woodlot Owners Association. So I'm just wondering - am I confused?

MR. FEDORA: No, again it's basically, in my opinion - and I mean the organization was named before I came along, but it's basically a branding. I mean woodlot, it's the same basic piece of property but it's more so when we approach the general public that might not have a firm grasp on it. Often when you hear the term woodlot, you instantly think, or a person, I think of somebody going out and cutting some trees down and doing management like that.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Right.

[Page 22]

MR. FEDORA: In all fairness, I mean we get questions on wildlife, on leaving a property as a nature preserve and putting hiking trails through and different things like that. So it's not necessarily the same sort of forestry-associated values. At the end of the day, my opinion is there isn't a huge difference.

[2:15 p.m.]

MR. PEARSON: We like to think that we're more about stewardship than commerce but maybe from what you say, we're not getting our message across.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Well, thank you. Before I start a second round, I just want to check with Mr. Colwell and Mr. Muir because they haven't asked a question. So before I start a second round I was just curious if there's a point you want to raise and then I'll kick into . . .

MR. MUIR: Well, I have a couple of questions. If they've already been answered, don't repeat yourself although these people probably would understand it better if it was repeated. Good years, many good years in the forestry industry in, let's say the last - I mean all kinds of real good years. How many or what percentage of owners and whatnot would have kind of put a little something away, because this industry goes up and down, everybody knows that? Is that a practice among those in the lumber industry to kind of put things away for good days or for bad days?

MR. PEARSON: I don't know the answer to that question.

MR. MUIR: You don't know the answer, okay. I just know there was a pile of money because everybody who had a woodlot went out and got a cut.

MR. PEARSON: That's right, prices were good and a tractor-trailer load of logs 10 years ago would reap almost $3,000. I think that the only people who are serious about this are the ones who are managing their lots in such a way that the value, not in terms of dollars but in terms of what's standing there, doesn't diminish. So they have a reserve for the future but it's not an industry in which people manage money particularly well, I wouldn't say.

MR. MUIR: I'm familiar with a couple of small - I guess I'm going to call them, woodlot management organizations. If you belong to one of those things, I mean I've got a couple of people who belong to them, you know - if this management organization says you need to cut it, then it gets cut. If they do that as part of that organization, do they then do silviculture because when I came in, you were talking about silviculture and gathered it was kind of haphazard.

MR. FEDORA: Well, the Group Ventures Associations are the only existing woodlot owner co-ops right now. There's still a few of them and there are probably about six or seven

[Page 23]

scattered around the province. So those would be the woodlot management organizations, I assume you're referring to, where you would have a ballpark of about 200 woodlot owners and indeed you have a forester or a technician on hand who comes in and says you have to cut this or, you know, do such and such to your property.

These organizations are not registered buyers so as such, they don't have their own silviculture program. So they have to approach mills much the same. The difference with these organizations is that they have a lot of purchasing power. As opposed to being one person managing 40 acres of land, you have thousands of acres of land and you can provide the mills with larger quantities of wood and so you have a larger bargaining chip and you can get more silviculture funding, but even these folks are finding it more and more difficult to get funding.

MR. MUIR: I just thought if you belonged to one of these organizations, that would be part of the total package.

MR. FEDORA: They do try to provide it, again, based on whatever budget they have and what priorities.

MR. MUIR: The last question I have, a number of years ago I was involved in an organization called the Nova Scotia Forestry Association - Woodsy Owl and his friends. Are you involved in the educational end of the industry? Do you do any of that?

MR. FEDORA: Not with that part in particular. I think that's Debbie Waycott . . .

MR. MUIR: She was involved with it.

MR. FEDORA: She's still involved with that. We do as much education and extension as we can - whether it's the woodland owner conference series which is ongoing. There are three conferences each year in east, west and central Nova Scotia to get information out.

We're frequently asked to do talks on a wide variety of forestry issues, depending on - I was just at a talk at Acadia University on invasive alien species. We're involved in education, but not that particular association.

MR. MUIR: I was just wondering how much of your time was spent on that. As I said, I was involved with it for a couple of years in the central part of the province. Thank you Mr. Chairman.

MR. CHAIRMAN: You're quite welcome. Mr. Colwell.

[Page 24]

MR. KEITH COLWELL: Just a couple of questions. Brown spruce long-horned beetle - how bad is the infestation, how far has it spread now?

MR. FEDORA: The outlying trap findings that they had between 2006 and 2008 went as far as Sheet Harbour, Antigonish, up north towards Five Islands area and up into Cobequid. It hasn't really travelled too far west.

Just to clarify, the brown spruce long-horned beetle itself, in terms of population, is not in epidemic proportions by any stretch of the imagination. All of these outlying findings that they've had - there's been one pest, one to two bugs in each of the traps. In subsequent years that they've gone back and put substantially more traps in the area, they haven't had a repeat. The bug itself, it is slowly spreading, but it's not in epidemic proportions and it really hasn't gone beyond the initial find.

The main issue with that has always been the fact that is an invasive alien species. It's the only known population in North America and as such there are strict regulations in place because the biggest fear is with the Canada-U.S. softwood agreement. We wouldn't want them to shut down their borders - all it took was one mad cow to cause some beef problems. It's more of the fact that it doesn't have a passport as opposed to the fact that there's a lot of them here.

MR. COLWELL: In the areas where they've identified them now, do they have mills processing the wood in that area now?

MR. FEDORA: Absolutely. I can send you some information on some of the latest maps; it would take too long to pop them up here.

Within the existing containment area, there's a dozen or so mills that are processing the wood and then outside of the containment area, there's approved facilities. The issue itself, in terms for small private woodland owners, it's not near the issue that it was four or five years ago. Your only concern is spruce logs that are greater than four inches on the butt. If you're selling a product of that nature, then you have some regulations that you have to adhere to. If it's any hardwood, any other softwood, then there's no issue there. If it's chipped, it's not an issue.

What the regulations stipulate is if you're in the containment area, you can move wood freely to any of the mills in there. If you want to sell to a registered mill outside a containment area, you need a movement of wood certificate which is relatively easy to obtain. There are far fewer roadblocks right now. The only drawback I can see - as a landowner, you would have a difficult time selling your wood to New Brunswick or out of province yourself. There aren't any approved facilities outside of Nova Scotia.

[Page 25]

MR. COLWELL: On the silviculture on the properties, are there some straightforward documentation you can get on that?

MR. FEDORA: No.

MR. COLWELL: I didn't think so. I thought that would be your answer.

MR. FEDORA: It's very complicated. It's one of the things that I've never quite understood with the Department of Natural Resources, why they haven't more aggressively promoted the program and tried to - I mean I get questions from the Department of Natural Resources' staff about the program because if you're not focused on it and really paying close attention, it can be confusing. It would be nice to have some more information out there.

MR. COLWELL: I just wondered because I, too, am a woodlot owner and thanks to Hurricane Juan, I had to have it clear-cut which made me very unhappy to this day but there was absolutely no choice. It has grown up now in spruce and fir and some hardwood. I was just wondering, you know, some basic things I might be able to do on this one piece of property that I might be able to straighten out and I'm not the only one, there are probably a lot of landowners there in the same situation.

MR. FEDORA: Whereabouts is your woodlot?

MR. COLWELL: In Porters Lake.

MR. FEDORA: I mean this is a very off-the-cuff sort of a prescription but odds are, in most places in central Nova Scotia, your natural regeneration is sufficient that you wouldn't have to replant. Once your trees - I mean if 2003 when it went through, did you cut in 2004?

MR. COLWELL: In 2005 I think it was cut.

MR. FEDORA: Okay, yes, so within another couple of years you would be eligible and ready for a pre-commercial thinning where you would go in and just sort of thin out your undesirable species and whether you're trying to promote crop trees or a more diverse forest but just allow space for your trees that you want to keep to grow and there should be assistance available for that.

MR. PEARSON: You wait until your trees are about four metres high generally on average and then you could apply for funding.

[Page 26]

MR. FEDORA: If you do the work yourself, you can actually - you get paid for doing the work. It might be easier just to have a contractor go in and do the work for you and then you have the work done - absolutely no back-breaking labour for yourself.

MR. COLWELL: Yes. I was just wondering because there are other people in the area in the same situation and I personally don't know what I'm going to do with the property.

MR. FEDORA: One of the best things that you can do, a lot of these mills, you know - if you approached say Elmsdale Lumber or Ledwidge Lumber or something like that, they'll send one of their forest technicians out to have a look at your property to see if indeed it would be eligible for funding and give you some advice and that's usually at no charge. It's to their advantage because as much as I bad mouth, or I shouldn't say bad mouth - as much as I might criticize the silviculture program and how it might be run, there are some very legitimate and decent mills out there that do do the right thing and they will provide you with silviculture funding, regardless of whether or not you sold them wood. So you can find people who will come out and look at your property and get some free advice.

MR. COLWELL: That's good to know because, as I say, there are people in the area who are probably more interested than I am but it's good to know. Do you do anything with Christmas trees?

MR. FEDORA: One of our board members is on the Christmas Tree Council. So any sort of questions that we get regarding Christmas trees, we kind of defer it to him but, personally, I don't deal with managing Christmas trees.

MR. COLWELL: That's something that may be under the woodland operation you have because that's all part of a sustainable crop . . .

MR. FEDORA: Yes, exactly.

MR. COLWELL: . . . that hopefully will be maintained for many years to come.

MR. FEDORA: Yes, as I say, that's more the Christmas Tree Council themselves and usually any questions that we get, we pass them along that way. Or, we'll contact the Christmas Tree Council and then give the information to landowners.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Parker.

MR. PARKER: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for this second opportunity - I had a few other questions I guess. First of all, on the brown spruce longhorn beetle, it was recently discovered in the Town of Pictou and it's certainly a concern. Just wondering how serious it is or is there going to be a quarantine zone, or whatever, and maybe it's unwarranted - the

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concerns. I know it has been contained and there are ways to work with it now in other areas of the province but what damage does a brown spruce longhorn beetle do to live trees, if any?

MR. FEDORA: Basically it operates much like any other wood boring beetle. The female lands on a tree and bores a hole into the side of the tree, lays its eggs, and then I think at the larva stage, the larvae will eat the living tissue, the cambium layer of the tree. So it creates a little hole. Now, if you have one beetle, then a tree can certainly repair itself but if you have hundreds of beetles on a tree, poking all these holes, all of a sudden you're not getting nutrients going from the root system up to the leaves, it breaks down that system. Generally with the brown spruce longhorn beetle what we've seen so far in Nova Scotia, it acts as almost a secondary pest. So it weakens trees and then you have more local disease and pests come in. They will actually finish the trees off.

MR. PARKER: So it actually is attacking the live, healthy tree rather than waiting until its over- mature or past its prime and then attacking?

MR. FEDORA: It's usually mature to over-mature, but, yes, characteristically it attacks healthier trees as opposed to our native spruce bark beetle. It's food of choice is red spruce and Norway spruce. It's been known to feed a little bit on white and black.

MR. PARKER: So the young, healthy trees, 30, 40, 100 years-old, long before they're mature - for a red spruce, they're actually attacking those trees, it's not when they're past or near the end of their lifecycle. It's when they're actually growing.

MR. FEDORA: There is the potential in some spots, absolutely, if it's a high enough infestation. It really depends. Any pest is like that, they'll stick with their preferred food as the population expands, they'll start gobbling up different sources.

MR. PARKER: Your pilot project here on the Riparian Silviculture Project; you're looking for roughly $500,000 to fund that. Have you had any answer from government yet on whether that might be a possibility or not?

MR. FEDORA: No. We've approached the Department of Natural Resources on several different occasions and we really had not the most positive response, I guess, to the program.

MR. PARKER: You're still hopeful?

MR. FEDORA: Well, yes, we're always hopeful.

MR. PARKER: But no definite word yet.

MR. FEDORA: No, no, nothing definite.

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MR. PEARSON: This is a project that's very dear to our hearts and we are very disappointed that we haven't been able so far to get funding for it. I think that some of the professionals within the Department of Natural Resources believe that there is available funding for this kind of work through so-called Category 7 forest treatment procedures. We don't agree. If you look at our proposal, you'll see that it's a stretch, in our view, to say that Category 7 funding would cover the sorts of things that we want to do.

This territory near the water courses is really critical for the health of the water, in particular, more than the forest. We are convinced that the treatments we propose would really make a big difference to that environment and to water fall. We're very anxious, we're going to go back to government again and seek this funding.

MR. PARKER: I've read through your program, you've had it out for about a year now.

MR. PEARSON: Yes. We need to revise it a bit, it's been overtaken by events to some extent, but we will revise it and re-submit it.

MR. PARKER: If I have time, I have another question on carbon credits or other possible sources of income for woodlot owners - ecological credits. It's been talked about for a time but do you see a point in time when woodlot owners will actually get compensation for something like that? Or is there something more than just carbon credits? You know, the value that the woodlot owners are providing to society - is there a way they could be compensated, other than by selling actual wood?

MR. FEDORA: I personally feel that there's great potential there. One of the difficulties - and you see the fragmentation in the province - is you, as a single small private woodlot owner, would have a very difficult time accessing the Chicago Climate Exchange or the Montreal Climate Exchange. There's a certain amount of megatons of CO₂ that you actually have to sequester in order to even sell or to trade on that market.

If you have a grouping of small private woodlot owners, all of a sudden you have more buying power or more sway, much like I mentioned with the group venture co-ops where they can approach a mill and say okay, we can guarantee you x amount of cords of wood and then they go in and access all the different woodlots.

One of things we're excited about is the fact that Nova Scotia has taken a serious look at small private woodlot certification. Right now, I suppose the two biggest forces would be ourselves and the forest fibre producers with their FSC program. What each of these programs do is offer woodlot owners a bit of a carrot, I suppose, in terms of market access and management plans. What that actually does for them, which they might not realize at first, it puts them in a larger grouping. All of a sudden you have a chain of custody, a paper trail. You have all this infrastructure in place that lends itself well to trading on the Chicago

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Climate Exchange, to promoting ecological goods and services and getting funding for it. There are examples that do exist of where this works. It's all relatively new within Canada, and within the Maritimes, but if you look abroad, there are a lot of programs out there.

MR. PARKER: So it actually translates into real dollars coming back to the landowner for not cutting their wood?

MR. FEDORA: Yes, absolutely. In Costa Rica, I know they have actually implemented a gas tax and that funding goes into - on a per hectare basis, you're paid to not harvest your rain forest as a landowner. I know in Manitoba, one of the things that we've been looking at with the Canadian Federation is, we've been examining the ALUS Program - I apologize for the acronym, I can't remember what exactly it stands for, I think Alternate Land Use System - that's specifically geared towards agriculture but it's the same basic process. They will pay you to fence off your brook so you don't have cattle grazing in there. So is it really much of a stretch to ask for some funding to help people protect their riparian zones? We don't think so.

MR. PEARSON: If I could just add - in Europe, there already is in place a system whereby forest landowners can sell carbon credits and there the carbon market is very highly developed, and it's bringing in about $43 per ton of sequestration. Here, it's about $6 on the Chicago Climate Exchange so you can see that we're still in the process of developing this.

Just let me comment about something you said. Let's say you had 100 hectares and you had an agreement whereby you were going to be paid for carbon sequestration. If the next day you went in and flattened it, you would have no more carbon sequestration. Why would anyone pay you for doing that? So what we see out of that is if the system is going to work, there have to be continuous audits that show that you are continuing to take from the atmosphere such and such many tons of carbon dioxide. That makes it both complicated and expensive, and that's where we are right now.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Glavine.

MR. GLAVINE: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I was just wondering if you had any comment on the province giving the Maritime Lumber Bureau $2 million towards the legal fees to join the lumber dispute?

MR. FEDORA: I don't really have a - I suppose I can have an opinion on that.

MR. GLAVINE: Yes.

MR. FEDORA: In terms of the federation, that really doesn't really impact us. As I understand, the Maritime Lumber Bureau didn't really want the funding when it was actually offered because it was perceived as a bit of bail out to industry and so it kind of ruffled the

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feathers of the U.S. I mean, obviously, it would be quite easy for me to sit here and say that I would rather see something like that invested to woodlot owners.

MR. GLAVINE: Sure, okay. In terms of the Natural Resources Strategy that is now a work in progress, there have been some presentations, consultations and so forth. From the federation's perspective, if you were to just give me a quick nub here of one, two, three directional pieces that you think should be part of the strategy, what would you be advocating?

MR. CHAIRMAN: Terry.

MR. PEARSON: One, two, three, and maybe it's one more than one. I think that what, first of all, the department needs to be concerned about is that we're not overcutting the resource. So what that means is that there has to be an assessment of what is out there, what's growing in terms of trees, and from that it would be possible to deduce how much you could cut each year. That would give us a kind of rough guide as to what the allowable cut per annum is. We don't know that. As far as I know, it's not known. If it is known, it's not enforced. So we are probably in a situation where we're taking fibre off the land faster than it's being replaced and if that's so, the long-term implications for the forest are bad. I think that is the key issue right now.

MR. GLAVINE: Anything further Andrew, your perspective?

MR. FEDORA: Basically what I've been doing at the Voluntary Planning meetings that I've been going to is just trying to ensure that woodland owner rights are respected. You have a lot of people offering lots of opinions with lots of backings - scientific, social, whatever the case may be - on how we should be managing Nova Scotia's natural resources.

My greatest concern is seeing poorly thought out legislation implemented which will severely impact landowners. In my view, it's always been that if Nova Scotia wants a clean, healthy environment, it has to invest in woodland owners. There are any number of examples out there of legislation gone bad, where you come in with a heavy hand, there's no enforcement behind it and all it does is make people's lives more difficult.

There is an equal amount of examples out there where people have invested in education, in promoting proper practices and assistance programs, where you see the greater good, I suppose. With the whole Voluntary Planning process, I really want to ensure that landowner rights aren't infringed on, and if something is being taken away, then something is provided.

MR. GLAVINE: My colleague had asked about the fact that membership was around 1,000-plus and 30,000 small woodlot owners. Do you provide any kind of supports or consult

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to non-members, or are you mainly dedicated to your membership now, using them as, hopefully, good work that will, in fact, allow others to join the federation?

MR. FEDORA: Well for me, personally, and I suppose it is very much a personality trait, I'm not much of a used car salesman, so when I get a phone call from a landowner, whether they're a member or not - and this is very frequent - I will provide them with advice. I will mention, if they ask about membership, but I don't aggressively - here, take my pamphlet. I offer up advice to anybody who calls with a woodland question, and I also recommend that they contact other organizations, whether it is woodlot owners and operators, forest fibres, forest products or whatever the case is, to get more than one opinion.

MR. GLAVINE: Just one last question, and you can separate this, if you wish, from your personal opinion and expertise, rather than perhaps the mind of the federation, although maybe the two are very close. I've always been of the opinion that Crown lands, especially in a province that has only 20 to 25 per cent of its forest being Crown land, should, in fact, be a model of excellence, a constant adherence to best practices and should be constantly modeling to what the rest of the 75 per cent should be subscribing to. How do you view our current practices and use of Crown lands? Are there some misgivings there that we really need to correct, or are we doing a pretty good job, from the point of view of natural resources?

MR. PEARSON: It seems to me that - I don't have a lot of experience looking at Crown sites but there is one next door to one of our woodlots and the Crown purchased it in 1990. I've never seen a public employee on that property. It runs to about 100 hectares.

I don't know whether the department is interested in active management or just simply feels that benign neglect is the best policy for that piece of land, which it might be, I don't know. I think if the department had a lot more money for active management, you probably would see people on there doing things, taking off over-mature trees and so on and so forth, and perhaps doing some selective harvesting, who knows.

If I may, I'd like to go back to an issue you raised earlier and that was the Voluntary Planning exercise. I was involved in that and I see a danger there. The danger is that there were 140-odd people at one of the meetings I attended and I had to say I was shocked by the violence of the opinions that some people have. Their faces were red, their veins were standing out and they were talking about two things - clear-cutting and exploration for uranium. Now, exploration for uranium doesn't concern us here except that the people who are declaiming the loudest about uranium exploration appeared to know almost nothing about uranium, its properties, its history, how you handle it and so on and so forth. When it came to clear-cutting, they were adamant that clear-cutting destroys the forest and it should never be allowed. There was one fellow who said that nobody should cut any tree except with the permission of the local authorities.

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So what I'm saying is that there is a lot of really extreme opinion there. It's very loudly presented and, of course, people who are agitating for that point of view tend to turn out whereas others who believe the world will unfold as it should, stay home, and so that final report from the Citizen Engagement Committee may be skewed in that direction. What happens at the next stage, the Blue Ribbon Panel, who knows. But I think the legislators have to look carefully at this thing and say, well, is this all science-based input we're getting?

MR. MUIR: I think you get a lot of opinion at those things and it's not necessarily informed.

MR. FEDORA: Indeed. One of the interesting things I have seen - there was a meeting in Debert, just briefly, and I was standing with a senior bureaucrat from Natural Resources and we were having a chat. He said, look around the room. He said, how many people do you recognize? I looked around and there were probably about 60 to 70 people there and I said, I recognize almost everyone here. He said, what does that tell you? I wasn't really sure what he was driving at. He said, how many people do you think are actually from the community? I mean the meetings are quite stacked. As Terry mentioned, you have your extreme views or agendas and I suppose it can't be helped, like I don't have any Voluntary Planning position. I do question how valuable the information will be at the end of the process.

To answer your question of the Crown, I do think that we could be doing more to manage Crown. I think there should be possibly more enforcement of the regulations that are in place - I mean, it's a good starting point and in fairness to the Department of Natural Resources, they have never really had a huge budget to deal with this. I think there's a more diverse range of values out there. I mean when you look at B.C. and what they do - your average Joe, anybody in this room could apply for a Crown licence and manage that property if they just follow the regulations. Why can't we do that in Nova Scotia? This is all unlicenced here and there's a lot of potential there even if you're not a private landowner.

MR. PEARSON: It may be a zero gain because if you spend money to send contractors in, they will bring product out that will bring some income, so the net cost of doing active management on those lands might not be very high.

MR. CHAIRMAN: With no other members, I just want to make a couple points. I introduced a bill to ban clear-cutting, actually three times. My view is, number one, your point about annual allowable cut is absolutely right on, that we're overharvesting. That was determined in the report, I think, by the federal government in 1998. They mentioned New Brunswick specifically as overharvesting by one and a half times. They didn't mention any other province by a number but the issue around clear-cutting is, to me - 97 per cent of our harvesting is clear-cutting in this province.

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I think harvesting should really be done as a treatment. That would limit our silviculture costs and I think clear-cutting should be a treatment, not the overall harvesting practice. So if you have a stand of fir that's going to die or infected by a disease, or insect, or whatever, clear-cutting would be appropriate. Hurricane Juan, if you get another one of those, there's not much else you can do but clear-cut those. Otherwise we do have to move toward more selection, sustainable harvesting practices, and a big part of that is an annual allowable cut, trying to determine what we're growing and how fast we want to replace that, or allow that to be replaced. When you mentioned British Columbia and somebody could apply for a permit and as long as they follow the regulations, you probably know Everett Tanner?

MR. PEARSON: Yes.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Well, I worked for Everett in the woods many years ago. Yes, I used a power saw for three years, and I have a brother who was a contractor for Laurie Ledwidge until recently. Everett told me about his trip to British Columbia. I think he went to investigate work opportunities in the west and went to B.C. and connected with a company there. They said, come on out, we want to show you one of our contractors and what great work he does in the forest sector. They went out, Everett said he stood on a big stump and looked around and he thought, holy mackerel, you'd never do this in Nova Scotia. He thought it was deplorable and these guys were saying, can't wait till you get here, this is one of the best sites we have.

So, if it's a question of following regulation, it might be a question of what the regulations are that determine the forestry practices. For his view, he certainly wasn't too impressed by what he was being shown, as something that was deemed by those individuals as a pretty good job in British Columbia. I would say I worry about, if somebody can get a permit and go on Crown land and whatever, that we actually have regulations that kind of reflect where we want our forest to go.

MR. FEDORA: Enforcement is a large issue there. It is with any regulation that's in place, in my opinion.

MR. PEARSON: In terms of clear-cutting, I think you can say clear-cutting if necessary, but not necessarily clear-cutting. I think if you're going to propose doing away with clear-cutting except for certain special circumstances like the ones you mentioned, you then have to explain how you're going to harvest and still make a profit. That's a big question.

MR. CHAIRMAN: That must be something along the lines of coalition if necessary, but not necessarily coalition.

MR. PEARSON: That's exactly right.

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MR. CHAIRMAN: It's 2:50 p.m. - any members have any question, another point they want to raise? Otherwise, we'll let you sum up and say thank you very much.

MR. PEARSON: I'll let Andrew finish, but I just want to say thank you for having us. We appreciate your attention and your interest.

MR. FEDORA: I think pretty much everything that needed to be said was said. I will have some pamphlets here for you if - this is my used car salesman coming out, pass those around - if any of you at any point have any questions with regard to Nova Scotia's forests, whether it's woodlot owners or otherwise, we're more than willing to help. Again, thank you for the opportunity to shed some light on our organization.

MR. CHAIRMAN: I want to say on behalf of the committee, thanks very much. We appreciate you coming and informing us and educating us as well. I see forestry organizations like this- so as much as we can get everybody's perspective on where they think the province should go or any advice that, hopefully will be well used by politicians.

For the committee members, I think we just have one item on the agenda and we could deal with that for the next committee. I need your signatures for the report. For members, two issues - the annual report of the committee, so I require your signatures for that and the September meeting with Coast Guard, there was a resolution passed that required correspondence so this is the letter:

Dear Minister Shea:

RE: Icebreakers Louis St. Laurent and Terry Fox

The Standing Committee on Resources met with representatives from the Canadian Coast Guard (CCG) on Tuesday, September 16, 2008, regarding the redeployment of CCG icebreakers Louis St. Laurent and Terry Fox from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland and Labrador.

During the meeting, the following motion was passed:

'That the Committee not endorse the movement of two ice breaking vessels to Newfoundland and Labrador.'

A copy of the transcript of the meeting is attached for your information.

It's signed by me and I just wonder if members have any questions on that. That was the motion before the committee which was passed. That correspondence hasn't been sent and I wanted you to be aware of it.

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Other than our next meeting date, with witnesses the Nova Scotia Egg Producers and that's for January 20^th. I guess we can discuss another agenda item at that time.

[The committee adjourned at 2:54 p.m.]