2010 Legislative Session: Second Session, 39th Parliament

HANSARD

The following electronic version is for informational purposes only.

The printed version remains the official version.

official report of

Debates of the

Legislative Assembly

(hansard)

Monday, May 17, 2010

Afternoon Sitting

Volume 17, Number 7

CONTENTS

Page

Routine Business

Introductions by Members

Tributes

Anniversary of Sullivan minesite deaths

N. Macdonald

Introductions by Members

Statements (Standing Order 25B)

Grandparents raising grandchildren

D. McRae

Forums on solutions and green jobs for B.C.

C. James

Nurses in B.C.

R. Cantelon

International Day Against Homophobia

M. Elmore

Vernon Vipers Junior A hockey championship

E. Foster

Mid-Island Sustainability and Stewardship Initiative

D. Routley

Oral Questions

Government relationship with Representative for Children and Youth

C. James

Hon. M. Polak

M. Karagianis

M. Elmore

A. Dix

M. Farnworth

Impact of harmonized sales tax on clothing costs for children

J. Kwan

Hon. C. Hansen

Sales tax exemption for leaky-condo repairs

R. Chouhan

Hon. R. Coleman

B. Ralston

Hon. C. Hansen

Funding for Highway of Tears project

G. Coons

Hon. M. de Jong

M. Mungall

B. Simpson

Petitions

C. Trevena

Orders of the Day

Second Reading of Bills

Bill 7 — Forests and Range Statutes Amendment Act, 2010 (continued)

C. Trevena

B. Routley

M. Sather

J. Rustad

H. Lali

Hon. P. Bell

Bill 13 — Forests and Range (First Nations Woodland Licence) Statutes Amendment Act, 2010

Hon. P. Bell

B. Simpson

N. Macdonald

D. Donaldson

Hon. P. Bell

Bill 14 — Motor Vehicle Amendment Act, 2010

Hon. M. de Jong

M. Farnworth

J. Horgan

N. Simons

Proceedings in the Douglas Fir Room

Committee of Supply

Estimates: Ministry of Education (continued)

Hon. M. MacDiarmid

N. Macdonald

M. Elmore

M. Mungall

S. Chandra Herbert

D. Donaldson

M. Sather

D. Routley

R. Fleming

B. Routley

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MONDAY, MAY 17, 2010

The House met at 1:34 p.m.

[Mr. Speaker in the chair.]

Routine Business

Introductions by Members

Hon. M. de Jong: Mr. Speaker, what a delight. It's not often that we in this chamber have an opportunity to welcome former Premiers back to this chamber, but today is one such day. It's worth noting that in addition to the many years of public service that Ujjal Dosanjh rendered in this chamber prior to becoming our 33rd Premier, as I recall, in the province of British Columbia, he has gone on to continue rendering public service not just in British Columbia but, indeed, across this country as a minister and now, still, as a Member of Parliament.

I know that all members in the chamber will want to pay tribute not just to his presence here today but to his ongoing service in the cause of this province and this country and to welcome his wife, Raminder, who is in the chamber with us as well.

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I want, also, to take a moment to point out that despite the fact that I'm sure he has missed this chamber dearly, and all of us, it was not purely nostalgia that brought Mr. Dosanjh back today, along with Raminder. He has brought a guest with him who has distinguished himself on the international stage. He is an individual who has served in the very highest capacities at the United Nations. He is an author of 11 books. He is a humanitarian. He has worked in the cause of refugees and the plight that people around the globe face confronted by poverty and difficult circumstances.

He took a remarkable and some might say foolish step not so long ago in entering elected office in his native country of India, and his service, his abilities, his intellect were immediately recognized with his appointment as Minister of State for External Affairs. He sits as a member of the parliament in the largest democracy in the world.

Many of us in this chamber had the opportunity to hear him speak on Saturday evening at the Canada India Foundation dinner. He provoked us to think — to think big, to think global — and to understand the potential for the bilateral relations that can, should and will arise between our two great nations.

Shashi Tharoor is our guest. He is travelling with his guest, Sunanda Pushkar, and they are travelling with Ashutosh Jha, who is visiting from Toronto. I know all members of the chamber will want to make Dr. Tharoor very, very welcome in the chamber today.

H. Bains: I'd also like to join with the Government House Leader in welcoming Dr. Shashi Tharoor, who I had the opportunity to listen to on Saturday — a speech which I thought was very informative, scintillating and, at the same time, gave us a lesson in what really is going on in India as far as the Indian economy is concerned.

I want him to have a good time here in this House. Hopefully, maybe later on we will learn a thing or two on how we can conduct each other a little better and maybe learn some lessons from you on how you are able to convince your opponents of your ideas and make things better for India and Indian people.

I ask all of you in this House to welcome Mr. Tharoor to this House. Thank you for coming and visiting us here, Mr. Tharoor.

D. Horne: Today in the precinct there are 72 grade 5 students from Bramblewood Elementary School — a wonderful elementary school in my riding — along with their teachers Mark Wong, Susan Jimenez, Ryan Kett and the principal, Brenda Walker. I hope when they come into the chamber and watch question period later that we are all on our regular and wonderful behaviour. I wish that all the members would make them truly welcome.

Tributes

ANNIVERSARY OF

SULLIVAN MINESITE DEATHS

N. Macdonald: Today is a very difficult anniversary for the people of Kimberley. On May 17, 2006, Kim Weitzel, Shawn Currier, Bob Newcombe and Doug Erickson died in a small shed at the Sullivan mine in Kimberley. I know this is a particularly difficult day for families and friends. On behalf of the Legislature, our thoughts and prayers are with them on this day.

Introductions by Members

Hon. M. Polak: Today at lunchtime many of us had the pleasure of joining the Grandparents Raising Grandchildren in the Ned deBeck Lounge for a lunch, where we were able to talk about some of the very important work that they do in supporting their grandchildren. They are ably led by Barb Whittington and Carol Ross. Many of them are here with us in the precinct for question period. Would the House please make them very, very welcome.

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Hon. B. Penner: Just a few moments ago I had the pleasure of talking to a school group from my constituency. There's a grade 12 class of students that are eagerly anticipating June, when they get to graduate in just a few

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weeks from now. In the meantime they've been led by their teacher, Mr. Dan Oostenbrink, along with a number of other adults, and today they're going to watch what we call question period. I ask that the House please make them welcome.

Hon. B. Bennett: It's my pleasure to introduce Kathryn Seely, who is the publications manager of the Canadian Cancer Society, B.C. and Yukon Division. With Kathryn is Patti Moore, who is the health promotion coordinator of the Canadian Cancer Society from the Kootenay region. Patti is a constituent. We had an excellent discussion over lunch today about cosmetic pesticides and their use. I would like the House to help me make them feel welcome.

Statements

(Standing Order 25B)

grandparents raising grandchildren

D. McRae: If we all lived in a perfect world, grandparents would have endless time to spoil the grandchildren, give them candy, let them stay up late and then send the kids home. But today I want to pay respect to a different role played by grandparents, one that many probably never expected to fill. Many grandparents envision their later years as their time — a time to socialize, play and relax. After all, this stage of life should be their time. But it's not always the case.

Across B.C. there are grandparents who have selflessly stepped forward to become the primary caregivers for their grandchildren. Having strong family and cultural connections are essential when children must leave the home of their parents, and grandparents are often able to fill a void and provide the love, stability and familiarity that children need.

I think all of us in this chamber who have been parents know it's never easy. Whether it's a diaper change, getting a band-aid, helping with high school algebra or just being there to provide guidance or a shoulder to cry on, a parent's job is never done. Can you imagine having to do all these tasks and more after your children have left home?

In the Comox Valley we are fortunate enough to have the child development centre, providing services to parents and grandparents for over 30 years. I was fortunate enough to be invited last January to visit the centre and to meet the grandparent support group that meet there. I was able to hear firsthand the challenges facing the grandparents, the supports they needed, the challenges they faced.

As an MLA, it gives me great satisfaction that I can help advocate for their needs. This government is committed to working with grandparents who are raising children and to exploring future initiatives that support them in their critical role as family members.

I want to thank the grandparents raising grandchildren who have taken the time out of their incredibly busy lives to come and visit the Legislature today and to bring greater awareness to the work they do and advocate for the supports they need to allow them to raise their grandchildren the best way possible. In respect to my grandmothers, I raise a virtual cup of tea to all of you and the work you do. Thank you so much.

forums on solutions and

green jobs for B.c.

C. James: I would like to speak today about developing positive solutions for B.C.'s economic, social and environmental future. The first initiative I want to talk about is Our Province, Our Future. This is a project that brings together British Columbians from all walks of life and every sector of the economy to dialogue about how we build a strong, sustainable economy of tomorrow.

On April 30, I was pleased to host a summit with more than 200 business, labour, First Nations, not-for-profit, environmental, academic, local government and community leaders in Vancouver. I was struck by the energy and the commitment of the people in the room, a commitment to work together to find common ground and build on our strengths to seize the opportunities for tomorrow. And this summit was only the first step. Regional and sectoral forums will be held as well as an on-line discussion. I invite everyone to join the conversation at ourprovinceourfuture.bc.ca.

I also want to speak about a green jobs conference that I attended and spoke to in Washington, D.C. This conference brought together business, government, labour and environmental leaders to talk about how we create tomorrow's green jobs. It was a tremendous opportunity to engage leaders from across North America looking at cutting-edge solutions for sustainable growth. Because every jurisdiction will be looking to create the green jobs of the future, we need to do everything we can to press our B.C. advantage.

We live in an extraordinary province. We all need to work together to find solutions to build a sustainable economy, fight climate change and build a stronger society.

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nurses in b.c.

R. Cantelon: "How was your day, dear?" That's a common exchange between a man and a wife at the end of a workday. I'm married to a nurse at Nanaimo Regional General Hospital, and those conversations occur at 7:30 at night on Wednesdays and Thursdays and then at 7:30 in the morning on Saturdays and Sundays after long, arduous 12-hour days. It's a very demanding profession both physically and emotionally, requiring the discipline

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of a drill sergeant and the sensitivity of a doting grandmother or grandfather.

The nurse is the first person that a patient sees when they wake up in the morning, and they're the first person that a patient sees during a health crisis in the hospital. Very often they're the last person at night when they settle down for the evening, but that's not the end of it. There are usually multiple visits during the evening.

Nurses provide continuing care and attention and comfort to the patients. They are the eyes on the patients, always sensitive and alert to changes in the patient's condition. They share the joy of recovery with the patient and then comfort and console them when there are setbacks. They certainly play an essential role in the recovery of patients in our hospitals.

It's a job filled with personal risk, exposure to disease, and, unfortunately and sadly, very often verbal and physical abuse from patients and visitors to the hospital. There are injuries from the strain and stress of the job and then, of course, the mental stress from the continuing emotional drain from the deep commitment they provide to the patients.

Nursing has become a very diverse and highly skilled occupation. OR, ICU, pediatric, palliative, rehabilitation, medical, post-surgical, public health and long-term care are among the many disciplines that the nurses provide in services. They always work as part of a highly skilled professional team providing excellent care and are the backbone of our health care system.

I invite the members — and I'm sure you'll join me, Mr. Speaker — in endorsing their motto for Nursing Week: "Nursing: you can't live without it."

INTERNATIONAL DAY

AGAINST HOMOPHOBIA

M. Elmore: The phrase "How do you do, dear" or "How was your day, dear" could also apply to a woman and a woman after they've come home from work, hon. Speaker.

Today, May 17, marks International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia. As such, it's a day of action, awareness and affirmation of the fundamental rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans-identified people and their families. Around the world lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans activists, along with community allies and politicians, will stop and acknowledge the high human and societal cost of discrimination, violence and harassment, and will continue in a collective push towards equality, acceptance and freedom.

Homophobia and transphobia is a form of discrimination and includes negative attitudes that can lead to direct or indirect discrimination against gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, transsexuals or transgendered people or towards anyone whose physical appearance or behaviour does not fit masculine or feminine stereotypes.

In Canada and here in B.C. it's true that we've made tremendous gains on social and legal rights. Yet lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans members of our communities still face the reality of homophobia and transphobia in their daily lives. Gay- and trans-bashing is still a frequent occurrence.

Social rights, freedom from violence and harassment, and the right to live and work wherever we want with dignity, safety and security have yet to be won for all, but change is possible.

In Vancouver QMUNITY B.C.'s Queer Research Centre is hosting the sixth annual International Day Against Homophobia awareness breakfast. In Abbotsford there will be the third annual Walk Away from Homophobia, organized by the Fraser Valley Youth Society and allies. In Campbell River the Campbell River Pride is holding its fourth annual Walk Away from Homophobia. Columneetza Secondary School in Williams Lake is organizing events.

There's more to be done. We can all be part of keeping this change going. Let's remember that when we stand strong, we stand strong together united against homophobia and transphobia.

VERNON VIPERS

JUNIOR A HOCKEY CHAMPIONSHIP

E. Foster: On Sunday, May 9, the Vernon Vipers defended their title as the top junior A hockey team in Canada, winning the Royal Bank Cup at a tournament held this year in Dauphin, Manitoba. The Vipers had to persevere through several tough series to get to the final tournament. One of the toughest was against the Powell River Kings in a seven-game series to win the provincial championship. The owner told me that was probably one of the best teams they've faced in the country, so a credit to them.

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This is only the second time a Junior A team has won back-to-back national titles. The first was the Vernon Lakers in 1990 and '91, and including the wins in '96 and '99, Vernon is the only six-time winner of this trophy.

Owner Duncan Wray, head coach Mark Ferner and their staff have done a great job of building the most successful and best-run junior franchise in the country. They have a dedicated group of talented coaches, scouts and training staff who have brought players from all over North America to Vernon and moulded them into a well-disciplined group of young men who are a credit to their homes, communities and families.

The players come from as far away as Boston, Philadelphia and southern California in the United States, and as far east as Herbert, Saskatchewan, in Canada. All areas of B.C. are well represented on the team, from Vancouver in the south, all through the Interior to Fort St. John, where young Braden Pimm — the nephew of proud uncle, the member for Peace River North — calls home.

To all the staff and players of the national champion Vernon Vipers, thank you very much for a great season, and we'll see you next year.

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MID-ISLAND SUSTAINABILITY

AND STEWARDSHIP INITIATIVE

D. Routley: I rise today to speak about the Mid-Island Sustainability and Stewardship Initiative, otherwise known as MISSI. "Initiative" is the right word. This group brings action to the word "sustainability" and turns the word "democracy" into a verb. They're participants in our community and very concerned people. They are located in the green agricultural lands of Cedar and Yellow Point between Ladysmith and Nanaimo.

MISSI works as a non-profit society within the mid-Island region, fostering sustainable development, rural and community stewardship, as well as protection of essential ecological systems. MISSI's purpose is to promote and implement sustainable community objectives with particular emphasis in their area.

MISSI is focused on responsible development that meets the needs of the community, and the regional district of Nanaimo has been open to MISSI's input as partners in the official community plan process. In fact, the RDN has cited the MISSI sustainability checklist as their guideline for development and part of their meeting of their responsibilities to Bill 27.

MISSI assembles local ideas and perspectives concerning land use, growth and development; ecological systems; habitat requirements; and communities. They formulate consensus and preferences for land use in our communities. They educate local communities on sustainable uses of land, water and air; food security; pollution; and climate change.

People and businesses are moving to Vancouver Island, and we welcome them and the growth that they bring. However, we also recognize the importance of our rural areas and our precious agricultural lands, as well as forests and riparian areas that surround us.

MISSI is striving to contribute to our regional growth strategy and the official community plan reviews. Their vision is global. Their concern is larger challenges, such as global climate change, food security and peak oil. MISSI acts locally and is taking steps to help determine the best practices that could guide sustainable community development in our area. Their initiatives include water testing and their yellow cedar carbon-neutral cooperative. I'd like to thank MISSI for their work in all these areas.

Oral Questions

GOVERNMENT RELATIONSHIP WITH

REPRESENTATIVE FOR

CHILDREN AND YOUTH

C. James: In a letter today to the Premier, the hon. Ted Hughes said the actions of this government strike a blow to the heart of his recommendations to improve child welfare in British Columbia. My question is to the Minister of Children and Family Development. Why did the B.C. Liberals spend time and resources fighting the children's representative in court, when they should be working with the children's representative to protect children in British Columbia?

Hon. M. Polak: The Leader of the Opposition will be aware that this is the result of a dispute from which we received a judgment from the Supreme Court of British Columbia and then today, as she mentions, a very thoughtful letter provided by Mr. Hughes. In that letter, though, he certainly does acknowledge the very real issues that we are seeking to balance, and he also suggests some potential solutions — those that we will carefully consider.

Mr. Speaker: The Leader of the Opposition has a supplemental.

C. James: On the same day that the court ruled that the government's actions were illegal, the minister actually told the media that the case was a waste of time and resources.

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It doesn't sound to me like the minister or this government is taking this issue seriously or that they're paying attention to what's at stake. Again my question is for the minister. Will she admit today that her government was wrong, apologize to the children's representative and to the people of British Columbia?

Hon. M. Polak: Again, to the Leader of the Opposition, we have received a very thoughtful letter by Mr. Hughes. In that letter he acknowledges the very real issues that we are seeking to balance. He recognizes that there are matters of great seriousness, and he proposes some solutions — those that we will genuinely consider.

Mr. Speaker: The Leader of the Opposition has a further supplemental.

C. James: I'd like to read a quote. "If public confidence in the child welfare system is to be restored, the independent body that speaks for children and youth must have a status that puts independence beyond question." Those are the words of Justice Griffin. A very thoughtful letter from Judge Hughes, and a very clear judgment from the courts for this government.

This minister has a chance to stand up and do the right thing, to admit that this government was wrong to withhold these documents from the children's representative and to take meaningful action to ensure that the representative can exercise her mandate without restriction.

So again, my question is to the minister. Will the minister take immediate action today, remove all the impediments and ensure that the children's representative can do her job?

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Hon. M. Polak: Well, it is extremely important to our ministry that we provide the representative and other independent officers with the documentation necessary to proceed with their work. We have always sought to do so.

Interjections.

Mr. Speaker: Members.

Hon. M. Polak: We have attempted to engage in the kind of balancing that Mr. Hughes speaks of in his letter. I read with interest his suggestions, his possible solutions, and we will consider those carefully.

M. Karagianis: "We have to remember that this is all about our kids. Of that, we cannot lose sight." Those were the words from Justice Ted Hughes today.

The children's representative protects the most vulnerable in this province, but this minister has shown that she cares more about throwing roadblocks up in front of the representative than she does about looking after children in this province.

Again to the minister: will the minister simply apologize to the children's representative and the people of B.C. and, frankly, get out of the way and let the representative do her job?

Hon. M. Polak: I think that one of the most important things we can acknowledge in this Legislature is that those who protect the vulnerable children of this province are our front-line social workers each and every day. Those people deserve to know that the ministry is going to work to seek to balance the kind of very real issues that Mr. Hughes acknowledges in his letter, and we certainly are going to take seriously his suggested approach to perhaps resolving some of these matters.

But let's remember that one of the other things that Mr. Hughes has held as primarily important in the protection of children is that we seek to depoliticize this process and instead come to constructive solutions.

Mr. Speaker: The member has a supplemental.

M. Karagianis: Let's just remember a few facts here about what this government has done. In 2003 they shut down the Office for Children and Youth. Then they overhauled the child welfare system while making massive funding cuts. They only reinstated the children's representative after the Hughes report forced their hand to do so.

It's clear from the words and actions of this minister that the government still does not get it. So will the minister stop getting in the way and let the children's representative get on with doing her job of representing the vulnerable children here in the province of British Columbia?

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Hon. M. Polak: Let's remember what this government has done. It has provided hundreds of millions of dollars in increased funding to respond to the recommendations.

We have increased the number of front-line social workers in this province in spite of declines in the number of children who are taken into care. We continue to perform the transformative work that will ensure that more and more children are able to be cared for in their family home and that we're not there always picking up the pieces, but instead are there supporting families from the outset.

M. Elmore: The children's representative is an advocate for youth and families who need help, and she just wants to do her job. The children's representative provides an important and independent accountability measure of government's actions.

The minister's actions have fundamentally undermined the office of the children's representative. When will the minister apologize to British Columbians for her actions and commit to work in good faith with the children's representative from this point forward?

Hon. M. Polak: We take our role in working with the Representative for Children and Youth very, very seriously — in fact, so seriously that we created an interface unit, an entire department within our ministry that seeks to respond to not only her request but those of other independent officers. In the last year alone we've responded to almost 600 requests for information to her office.

By any measure the Representative for Children and Youth receives better and more frequent communication from this ministry than any other independent officer as they relate to government.

A. Dix: I know that ministers in question period will tend to obfuscate, but the minister was just repudiated in the courts and has just asserted, in spite of that repudiation, that she has the best record of cooperation of any ministry and any minister in the government. It's absurd, hon. Speaker. It's absurd.

The minister routinely said that this court case was a waste of money. Well, the judge in the case awarded costs to the representative. The judge in the case decided it was that minister that was wasting money. So will that minister acknowledge that she wasted money that would have been better spent for child protection, and will she apologize to the people of British Columbia?

Hon. M. Polak: As we've acknowledged from the outset, from time to time independent officers need to have access to cabinet materials. We have never questioned that. But this was never about access to documents. The representative…

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Interjections.

Mr. Speaker: Members.

Hon. M. Polak: …always had access to those documents under the same protocol as any other independent officer. We have sought in every occasion to provide the representative with each and every document that she has sought. It is worth noting that in all of her published reports to date, she has not relied upon cabinet documentation.

Mr. Speaker: The member has a supplemental.

A. Dix: We passed the legislation question unanimously in the Legislature, and the courts ruled in favour of the representative in spite of the position taken by the minister. Her disdainful responses have damaged that relationship.

It's time, hon. Speaker. We have an Apology Act in British Columbia. It's time that the minister availed herself of that, apologized and helped rebuild the relationship. Will she do that today, or will she continue to defend this silly waste of government resources?

Hon. M. Polak: What I would like to see in this House is that there would be a ceasing of the politicization of issues and matters around this. It's clear. It's clear that unlike….

Interjections.

Mr. Speaker: Sit down for a second.

Continue, Minister.

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Hon. M. Polak: Both for the Representative for Children and Youth and for myself as minister, our primary goal is to find the best possible ways we can to serve the vulnerable children of this province. I'm confident that as we go forward, even this dispute is one that we can manage to resolve between us and that we can go ahead and work forward. I am not confident that this opposition will ever stop politicizing the matter of children's welfare in British Columbia.

M. Farnworth: The minister wants to talk about depoliticizing. Well, the minister started it by taking the commissioner to court. That was putting politics into the children's commissioner's office.

She talks about wanting to work together. Then she needs to realize something. The children's commissioner…

Interjections.

Mr. Speaker: Members.

M. Farnworth: …is an independent officer who is above politics. If she wants to rebuild that relationship, she should take the first step and admit her government was wrong and apologize to the children's commissioner. Will she do that?

Hon. M. Polak: Unfortunately, the member ought to get his facts straight before he rises in this House. In fact, on various occasions we proposed solutions to the representative, solutions that would afford her access to the cabinet documents. She was unwilling to participate in any of the discussions toward an agreement that would have seen her receive those documents, and instead it was the representative….

Interjections.

Mr. Speaker: Members.

Take your seat for a second, Minister.

Continue, Minister.

Hon. M. Polak: We proposed, at various points, solutions that the representative could have taken with us in order to have access to all of the documents that she wished. She was not willing to abide by that, and therefore, it was the representative who took government to court. I understand the issues that are very real, which caused the representative to take that action, but we continue to be of the view that there was another way to resolve this.

Mr. Speaker: The member has a supplemental.

M. Farnworth: Well, the judge was very clear. In fact, she was so clear that the minister's government will be sending a cheque to the children's commissioner to cover court costs.

My question to the minister is: along with the cheque that's going to the commissioner, will they at least have the good grace to include a letter of apology?

Hon. M. Polak: Again, I want to acknowledge that when it comes to the work of the Representative for Children and Youth and my work as a minister, our ultimate goal is the protection of children who are some of the most vulnerable in the province.

We have received a very thoughtful letter from Mr. Hughes. It is one that certainly, unlike the opposition, looks forward to what kinds of solutions he might be able to propose. We're happy to consider that, and I think we should take the time to consider the very thoughtful words he's written to us.

IMPACT OF HARMONIZED SALES TAX

ON CLOTHING COSTS FOR CHILDREN

J. Kwan: Last Friday the government finally coughed up a list of some of the items that will cost taxpayers

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more money because of the HST. Charging this hated sales tax for adult-sized clothing and shoes for children is blatantly unfair. Can the Minister of Finance tell British Columbians: why is he penalizing families with kids who are just gentle giants?

Hon. C. Hansen: We acknowledge that there are some household items that families will wind up paying a little bit more for as a result of the harmonized sales tax. That is exactly why we have put in place an HST credit. There will be a cheque in the mail for 1.1 million British Columbians.

[1410]

It's also the reason why we have reduced personal income tax — to make sure families have more money in their household budget to cover those things that might cost a little bit more after HST.

Mr. Speaker: The member has a supplemental.

J. Kwan: This is a $1.9 billion tax shift onto the backs of consumers. In 2010 it is not unusual for a ten-year-old or a 12-year-old to wear adult-sized clothing and shoes. In fact, my 14-year-old stepson has been wearing adult-sized clothing and shoes for the last two years. My little girl, who just turned seven, is almost as tall as me in height.

The last I checked, a 14-year-old child who does not fit into children's-sized clothing and shoes is still a 14-year-old kid. Why is this government bringing forward a tax policy that discriminates against children based on their size?

Hon. C. Hansen: If we want to look at tax burden on families, we only have to go back ten years to look at the tax burden that was imposed by that previous NDP government.

Interjections.

Mr. Speaker: Members.

Continue, Minister.

Hon. C. Hansen: In fact, ten years ago British Columbia families were paying some of the highest tax rates anywhere in North America. In fact, every B.C. family today has seen a reduction in their personal income tax by a minimum of 35 percent over that period of time.

Interjections.

Mr. Speaker: Continue, Minister.

Hon. C. Hansen: In addition, as we know from the leading economists in Canada, this shift to a harmonized sales tax is going to produce jobs. That means more steady income for B.C. families in every single corner of this province.

SALES TAX EXEMPTION FOR

LEAKY-CONDO REPAIRS

R. Chouhan: Residents of a building on Acorn Avenue in Burnaby have been struggling to afford the $75,000 they each have to come up with for the leaky-condo repairs to their buildings. Now they need to find an additional $100,000 between them to make up for the cancellation of the PST rebate program when this government's HST kicks in.

My question is to the Minister of Finance. How will this government assist these leaky-condo owners to make the repairs to their units when this repair will not be completed until after the HST kicks in?

Hon. R. Coleman: The member opposite knows that we announced last July that we were going to shut down the program around leaky condos because it actually had been a program that had gone more years than it was intended to. It was done over a longer period of time. It was supposed to be a $250 million program, which was actually around $780 million. It did include a PST issue with regards to that. We announced to everybody that it would be expiring on the 30th of June, and it will.

[1415]

Mr. Speaker: The member has a supplemental.

R. Chouhan: When the work began on fixing the building there, there was no way to know that the PST rebate program would end and that the HST would be implemented. They had no idea of that. The whole province was taken by surprise on the HST.

Again to the Minister of Finance: what assistance does the government have for the residents who will now face a $100,000 hike to the repair bill, thanks to this government's HST and the cancellation of the PST rebate program?

Hon. R. Coleman: We had a program that was in place and did thousands of homes over a period of years. We changed, back a number of years ago, the whole building envelope issue in British Columbia. We knew that over a period of time, the buildings would be taken care of. They have.

The reality to the member opposite is that on every individual building, sometimes there are a number of other factors with regards to why they may be having water ingress or egress problems. It could be bad maintenance. It could be that they haven't fixed the roof. It could be any number of issues. This was never intended to be a program….

Interjections.

Hon. R. Coleman: You wrote the program. You told us it was a ten-year program when you put it in place,

[ Page 5390 ]

hon. Members. It went over ten years. It's done the job it was supposed to do. The PST piece is being eliminated, just like the Homeowner Protection Office piece was eliminated last year, as we told people at that time.

B. Ralston: As the minister knows, the decision of a strata council to come up with the necessary money to make costly repairs is not an easy one. Sometimes, in many cases, it takes a very long time for those members of that strata council — those tenants, those owners — to be in a position to pay that money.

When the HST was scrambled together either before the election or after the election, can the minister advise the House: was the plight of these people considered by the government at all?

Hon. R. Coleman: This was a program that was put in place over 12 years ago. The program served its purpose. It did over $780 million in reconstruction loans. It had a PST rebate for people that were doing repairs with regards to leaky condos.

Last year we announced that the program would sunset. It is sunsetting; that hasn't changed. Members are well aware that the legislation has also been passed with regards to sunset this program, and we're moving on.

Mr. Speaker: The member has a supplemental.

B. Ralston: My question is to the Minister of Finance. What studies were done on the impact of the HST on leaky-condo owners?

Hon. C. Hansen: The studies show the elimination of the provincial sales tax…

Interjections.

Mr. Speaker: Members.

Continue, Minister.

Hon. C. Hansen: The studies show that the elimination of the provincial sales tax and the adoption of a harmonized tax system in British Columbia, harmonized with the federal goods and services tax, is going to stimulate the economy and make jobs. That ultimately benefits all British Columbians.

Interjections.

Mr. Speaker: Members.

FUNDING FOR

HIGHWAY OF TEARS PROJECT

G. Coons: In 2006 the Highway of Tears report recommended the establishment and funding for a Highway of Tears project coordinator. Last Friday the project's funding ran out. Nearly 20 women have gone missing along this stretch of highway, and this government can't find the time to make it a priority. Can the Attorney General commit today that the funding for the Highway of Tears project will continue?

Hon. M. de Jong: I'm certainly sympathetic to the member highlighting the tragedy that has accrued along the Highway 16 corridor. I can't imagine anything more traumatic or more difficult than to confront the fact that a loved one has gone missing or has been killed.

Having said that, I wish the member would at least acknowledge the fact that the government has contributed upwards of $150,000 towards the work that is taking place on a preventative basis, in addition to the efforts of countless investigative officials who are seeking to find what these families ultimately want and deserve — that is, an answer as to what happened to their loved ones.

[1420]

Mr. Speaker: The member has a supplemental.

G. Coons: The Attorney General should know that the Highway of Tears has not disappeared, and neither should the funding. This is the second time that the funding for the Highway of Tears project has been threatened by this government. In 2007 the government had to be shamed and embarrassed into continuing to fund this project.

British Columbians want resolution to this serious issue. Families and communities want closure. Can the Attorney General commit today that the funding for the Highway of Tears project will be there and that the project coordinators will not have to continually beg the government to ensure their work continues?

Hon. M. de Jong: What I can assure this member and all members of the House is that the officials involved in this have been meeting with the Carrier-Sekani Family Services, who have been receiving funding and have been undertaking the work. They are in the process of receiving the reports that have been produced by that group and examining the recommendations and the findings.

There has been and will continue to be a steady dialogue, and we will endeavour to do everything we can to provide the assistance and support necessary both to prevent repeats of these tragedies and to provide the families of these missing women with the answers they so desperately need.

M. Mungall: We know that money has been spent. The question is: will it be continued? Will the minister answer and commit today that funding will continue for this very important program?

Hon. M. de Jong: I can appreciate the member's interest on behalf of not just the organizations involved

[ Page 5391 ]

but the families across the province who are connected either directly or indirectly. We have, I think, demonstrated over the past three to four years a genuine commitment to trying to provide both the investigative resources and the support to this organization necessary to take preventative action. We're working with the group. We intend to continue working with the group and doing what we can to ensure that they have the resources necessary to continue with their work.

B. Simpson: The Attorney General has spoken about having a steady dialogue with the families and with the folks involved with the Highway of Tears. What's being asked for is steady funding. He talked about the necessary resources for the Highway of Tears, and the necessary resource that is being asked for is steady funding — not having it run out, not having to continue to come back and plead to have an ongoing investigation on the Highway of Tears.

The question is straightforward. The minister has been asked it in a straightforward manner. Will he commit today to steady funding? Renew the funding now, and commit to a longer term to continue the work on the Highway of Tears.

Hon. M. de Jong: I know that this member and all members of the assembly will be interested in at least two important facets of this. The government is doing everything it can to provide the resources necessary on both an investigative and a preventative front. But I know he would also want the government to be taking steps to ensure that the deliverables that are set as part of providing that funding are actually being met and, if they aren't, how those resources can be better allocated to meet those objectives.

I can assure this member that we will continue to work in that vein and that we will continue to work cooperatively with the agencies and the people who have taken such a proactive step to help these families and prevent future tragedies.

[End of question period.]

Petitions

C. Trevena: I have a petition to present with several hundred people signing on from Campbell River and the neighbouring islands asking the government to overthrow the HST.

[1425]

Orders of the Day

Hon. M. de Jong: In Committee A, I call Committee of Supply — for the information of members, the estimates of the Ministry of Education — and, in this chamber, second reading debate on Bill 7, Forests and Range Statutes Amendment Act.

Second Reading of Bills

Bill 7 — Forests and Range Statutes

Amendment Act, 2010

(continued)

C. Trevena: I'd like to stand and take my place in debate on Bill 7, the Forests and Range Statutes Amendment Act. Representing a forest-based community, every time there is a forestry act tabled, people in the community examine it with interest and hope that it's going to produce the necessary impetus that will help revitalize the communities.

[L. Reid in the chair.]

I've got to say that we've just had the week back in the community and seen that a lot of people are back at work in the bush, that people are working, that things are happening. But we are still facing major problems. We have in Campbell River, as I've mentioned many times before…. There is still no sawmill there, and the Catalyst pulp mill's doors are closed and have been for more than 15 months now.

There is really a sense that there is a need to have action — hopefully, action driven by the government — which will help revitalize the industry on the north Island and on the coast.

In the opening remarks the Minister of Forests and Range spoke about the Port Alice specialty cellulose mill. I think one of the interesting things about this bill is how it's looking at biofuel and new uses of fibre. In talking about the Port Alice mill, the minister mentioned that the items produced there are not traditional. You're not producing pulp. It isn't a pulp mill. It is a specialty cellulose mill, and it's been working since actually about 1912. It's going to celebrate its 100th anniversary. So doing new things with fibre isn't actually anything new. It has been going on for a long while.

I know that Port Alice…. It's now up and running. It's employing many people, and we're hoping that it continues to be up and running and employing many people for many years to come, looking at new ways of doing things.

I know that the managers at Port Alice…. I have meetings with them. I'm having a meeting with them in the next month or so to talk about new ways that the mill can expand and new things that can happen there so it's just not producing the specialty cellulose it has been producing for many years but can expand and do different things. I think there is really a lot of opportunity there and a lot of opportunity elsewhere to be doing new things with our fibre.

[ Page 5392 ]

If this bill is actually going to help both Port Alice and other mills that can be looking at fibre in new ways, I think that really is very interesting. It's not just the classic: "We're going to basically cut down trees and produce paper." We're going to use our trees to produce…. Whether it's the fibres in the clothes that we're wearing, whether it is for armaments, for cigarette filters, for a lot of different aspects that people may or may not agree with, there are lots of things we can use our trees for.

I would hope that this bill in its design will really allow the expansion of these sorts of industries and will obviously be very helpful for the mill in Port Alice. As I go back to what I was saying in my opening remarks, the Port Alice mill is a vibrant mill. It's been — apart from when it was shut down a few years ago, and luckily, we were able to get it reopened — working on the north Island for almost a hundred years, unlike other mills in the communities.

There is no large-scale sawmill operating on the north Island, nor is there a traditional pulp and paper mill now that the Catalyst is gone. We are dependent on this mill and the new ways of working, but we're also dependent on new ideas. There are lots of new ideas, which I would hope this bill will also help.

[1430]

I've talked with the Minister of Forests and Range, and constituents have talked with him, and he's been very open to conversation about salvage and about new ways of accessing salvage. One of the things that some people in the communities, including First Nations on the north Island, are looking at is building up pellet plants so that the biofuels can actually be produced by communities on the north Island, using the waste that's in the wood, and making agreements with local salvage operators to ensure that that can happen.

This is also going to be very positive if this bill allows those agreements to go ahead, and I think this is really what is being sought in the north Island. It's looking for new ways of doing things, of making sure that we can develop new opportunities.

Looking at pellets, the First Nations that are looking at doing pellet production have lots of ideas, can see this as a possible very vibrant economic development opportunity for their communities. It will get people employed. It will use the waste wood that is in the bush that is in their traditional territory.

It also will be able to use local salvagers who are maybe not First Nations, give them a place to work and at the same time do what we would all hope that the biofuels do, which is transferring some technology so that we're using biofuels and wood waste as a form of heating, a form of fuel, and reducing greenhouse gases.

One reason it would reduce greenhouse gases is that it's not then shipping the pellets from the Interior over to the coast, which is both costly and has a huge impact on greenhouse gases. If we could get things like this happening, the trickle-down effect is quite amazing. I've talked with various ministers in the past and continue to do so.

Greenhouses in the Campbell River area have been burning coal, which is locally produced at Quinsam Coal. While they are burning coal with many scrubbers and producing as few emissions as possible and have a very low carbon footprint because the coal is just transferred from Quinsam Coal to just north of the Oyster River, they've been advised that they can't heat their greenhouse with coal anymore. They have to make a shift.

They're looking at the cost of doing that. If they had to use the cost of bringing in pellets from the Interior, it would be prohibitive, so they would be looking at possibly using pellets that could be produced in the north Island. You have a far lower impact, carbon footprint, by moving those pellets just down the Island rather than having to bring them from the Interior to people who want to use them there.

There are a lot of opportunities that can be captured and, I would hope, used, if there is the commitment to take some of the ideas from this bill and actually enact them, make them happen in the community and not just let them stand there.

The disappointment that is out there in my community is that we get lots of little bills on forestry and not something comprehensive that's really going to address the bigger picture. As I mentioned, I was travelling around the constituency this last week, using the opportunity to get out and hold community meetings and meetings with individuals right around the community. As I say, people are back at work. Western is employing people. But what needs to be recognized is that changes are happening.

Talk to anybody in the north Island. There is a huge desire for a real sawmill in the north Island — to make that happen, to look at how we can develop that. There are changes happening in the growth of woodlots. I toured a woodlot on Malcolm Island in the week off. A number of the areas on Malcolm Island have now been divided into woodlots, with local ownership and with very interesting ways of working. But again, if there was a mill that could be used that could take the wood from these woodlots as well as other local wood, it would be the opportunity to create a lot more employment than the little dribs and drabs.

As I say, there are changes happening. We have a number of First Nations moving on in their treaty talks. There will be, eventually, agreements and, hopefully sooner rather than later, agreements-in-principle for the 'Namgis, and that will have an impact on TFLs in the area, particularly TFL 37, which is in the Nimpkish Valley. So there will be change there. Whether this bill will allow that change to be enhanced and look at new ways of doing things is something that I think is questionable.

[1435]

[ Page 5393 ]

We really do have to look at the bigger picture of tenure, of who has tenure. I've talked many times in this House about the need and what this side of the House is positioned on and has advocated for, which is the need for tenure reform. While Western is keeping people employed in the bush at the moment in the north Island, it isn't keeping anybody employed in a mill in the north Island and is effectively a monopoly on the north Island and much of the Island in coastal forestry.

One of the problem with the bill is that it takes some of the regulatory burdens away from the forest companies. We've already seen the cut in oversight and compliance within the ministry. It is basically taking some of that oversight for forest practices from the Crown, from the ministry, and putting it into the hands of the private companies.

While one always hopes for the best, when you talk to the people who work in the forest industry, as individuals they are really committed to ensuring that they protect the place that they work, because it's the place that they live. It's the place where they will go fishing. It's the place where they will hunt. It's the place where they will camp with their kids.

People really want to do that, but at the same time, in the bigger picture, when you have the companies looking after the oversight, it's using the old analogy. It's a bit like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse sometimes. I think that we really need to address how we're going to do the oversight, and I would say that the best oversight would be through the trained professionals in the ministry and allowing the enforcement and compliance to continue.

I think that there has to really be a move in recognizing that we have to do things differently in forestry and forest tenure, in how we harvest, in what we harvest and in what we produce. I think that we have to start somewhere.

I would prefer to see a bill that is more encompassing, that will look at the bigger picture, that will look at the needs of the whole province and would look at the communities such as the north Island, which have long served the province well on forestry and should continue to serve the province well on forestry, but really are being very shortchanged. Look at the bigger picture and come with a plan for the forest industry.

We have a number of bills that we are going to be debating over the next few days — this bill, and we've got a number of other bills on forestry. I think it would be really healthy to have an overall plan from the minister.

As I say, there are clearly things in this bill that should be helping the north Island. There are other aspects of the bill which will not help the north Island. I think we need to be much more open to new ideas, new ways of working and looking at ways that we can evolve the industry and that part of the economy into something that will serve us not just for a few years but will serve us for the many, many years that we as legislators are supposed to be investing into the future.

We are talking about trees, and trees are going to be the cycle that long outlive us in this Legislature and many governments. On that, I'll take my place in the debate.

B. Routley: Bill 7 is another bill that amends a whole bunch of different sections of the forests and range statutes. I'm extremely concerned that these vast changes are more tinkering with the forest policy in British Columbia, some of it with unknown consequences as of right now. One of the features of this bill is to change from the common form of valuing timber. That's through scaling timber down at a dry-land sort and assessing its value.

[1440]

Essentially, they scale both the large end, the stump end, of the log as well as the top of the log and come up, through a formula, with exactly how many cubic metres are in each and every log that is brought in. Based on various values and all the rest of it, they're sorted.

What is contemplated, as I understand it in our overview of these changes with ministerial staff, is better utilization of fibre. On its face, that may be a good idea. Certainly, we would agree that moving to better utilization of fibre throughout British Columbia is a worthwhile cause. Nothing upsets forest workers and forest communities more than seeing mountains of wood wasted and timber that's fallen and not utilized.

In fact, in some of my more radical days when I wasn't standing in the Legislature, I recall back in 1989 when I was involved in protests about better utilization of timber and forcing then Fletcher Challenge to…. What used to be allowed was a whole logging truck worth of wood left out on basically a hectare of land. That's minuscule now. Of 40 cubic metres of wood…. That's roughly a loaded logging truck. Imagine that on a hectare of land. That's almost nothing compared to what we see out in the woods today, if you go on almost any claim.

Certainly, I'm hearing the horror stories all over the coast. Up in the north with pine beetle, there are vast areas of wood that are underutilized. From that perspective, it looks like there are some changes that may be a good thing.

On the other hand, just as we saw before with this government, they talked about: "We're going to change things with revitalization." It was one of those words that sounds good. We're going to revitalize the forest policy in British Columbia. But they didn't really revitalize anything. As a result of those changes, we lost tens of thousands of jobs throughout British Columbia, first through the appurtenancy clause changes that disconnected every sawmill from the forest land.

Essentially that allowed companies to shut down mills at will, and they did — in fact, almost 50 percent of manufacturing plants. Certainly, a long list of operations throughout British Columbia have been shut down.

[ Page 5394 ]

You know, I've often wondered if there was a time and place to talk about the number of mills that have closed. This government talks about investment here this morning, but I think it's time, especially when we're dealing with multiple changes to the Forest Act, changes in scaling to allow better utilization. Why would some of those changes be necessary?

Well, one only needs to look at the long list of what's occurred from 2000 to 2009. It's a total of 45 lumber mills and manufacturing plants, 16 engineered and value-added plants, six shake-and-shingle operations, two veneer-peeling operations, one plywood operation and a pole yard. That's just the ones we know of at this particular juncture.

This was put together by the Steelworkers, who would certainly know and be familiar with a lot of the operations that went down. I think it's worthwhile listing them off.

Associated Shake and Shingle, Maple Ridge. All of the employees and workers at these places had families that depended on them. They went to work every day wanting to do a good job. The employers would tell them what an important asset they were as individuals committing to work for that employer and work in that operation. They worked hard, these workers and their families, and a lot of them feel like they were thrown away like yesterday's news.

[1445]

The day comes that the employer just says: "Well, you know what? We're not making enough money." So they shut it down, and mill after mill went down. I started with Associated Shake and Shingle, but Bayside mills in Gibsons, Canfor Panel and Fibre in New Westminster, CIPA Lumber mill in Nanaimo. This is from 2000 to 2009.

The Ditidaht Forest Products at Nitinat Lake. Doman Industries' Nanoose mill in Chemainus. That's one I was very familiar with. I visited all those guys and know that it took $1.3 million in severance to pay those crews off to go home, but a lot of them would have rather worked. A lot of them had worked all their lives at that mill.

The Doman's Silvertree Vancouver operation; Faulkner Wood Products in Surrey; Fraser Pulp Chips in Surrey; Gold Band, Maple Ridge; the Interfor Fraser Reman in Coquitlam; Interfor Fraser Mills, Coquitlam; Interfor Field Sawmill in Courtenay; Interfor McDonald Cedar in Fort Langley; Interfor Queensboro mill in New Westminster; the Interfor Squamish mill; the Maple Leaf Shake and Shingle in Maple Ridge; Meeker Cedar in Mission; North American Shake and Shingle in Mission; Northwest Hardwoods, a Weyerhaeuser operation in Delta; Pacific Coast Cedar in Maple Ridge; Sawarne Lumber in Vancouver; Teal Jones in Boston Bar.

Just think of all these as I'm listing them off. Every one of them has a long list of faces attached, of families depending on those workers to go to work every day and supply jobs. Literally, the total amount of jobs lost — while I take a break from reading the long list — is 21,600 in forestry and logging between 2000 and 2009, and 18,500 jobs lost in wood products manufacturing.

This is industry data by the North American Industry Classification System. The total, I might add, is 40,100 jobs lost in the forest industry from 2000 to 2009. So it is indeed good news, as we heard this morning, to hear of a few mills coming back in, putting an extra shift on here or there. But compared to this list….

I finished at Boston Bar. The Terrace Lumber Company in Terrace. TimberWest's Elk Falls sawmill in Campbell River, and the pulp mill, by the way, has been shut down indefinitely. The TimberWest Youbou mill, the mill that I come out of. I started in that mill back in 1970 and worked with those guys till 1985. I knew those workers and their families, and it was devastating when they lost their mill.

The West Coast Cellulose mill in Vancouver; West Fraser, West Coast Timber in Prince Rupert; West Fraser Terrace mill; the Western Forest Products Island Phoenix mill in Nanaimo; the Western Forest Products New Westminster mill.

The Western Forest Products mill in Tahsis. There's a community that's virtually wiped out. If you've ever been to Tahsis…. You go to Gold River and then you bounce on this logging road all the way to Tahsis. It was a nice little community. Before Doman, it was owned by Pacific. That mill is shut down. It's gone. All those families have been sent packing.

Western Forest Products Vancouver mill; the Western Forest Products Woodfibre mill; Weyerhaeuser K3 Specialty Board in Vancouver; Weyerhaeuser Particle Board in Vancouver; the Weyerhaeuser Canadian White Pine mill in Vancouver. All those plants closed.

In the interior region: Atco Lumber Company in Fruitvale; Bell Pole in Lumby; Canfor in Fort Nelson; Canfor Specialty Mill in Quesnel; Canfor North Central Plywood in Prince George; Canfor Northern Specialties in Prince George; Canfor in Taylor, the mill closed; Canfor in the Upper Fraser; Canadian Woodworks, Prince George; Canpar Industries, Grand Forks; Canwood Furniture, Penticton.

Carrier Lumber in Valemount; Compwood Products in Heffley Creek; Creekside industries, Christina Lake; Gateway Forest Products, Prince George; Interact Wood Products, Prince George; Kamloops Forest Products, Kamloops; Kispiox Forest operation in South Hazelton; Kootenay Veneers, Grand Forks; Louisiana Pacific in Malakwa.

[1450]

Lytton Lumber in Lytton; McBride Forest Products in McBride; North Okanagan Cedar; Pacific Precision Wood Products in Prince George; PG Specialty Wood Products in Prince George; Pope and Talbot in Midway; Riverside Forest Products in Lumby; Skeena Cellulose,

[ Page 5395 ]

Carnaby mill; the Tolko Louis Creek operation; TSW Laminating; Vernon Kiln and Millwork; Weyerhaeuser — actually the planer there, we hear, is shut down — Kamloops; Weyerhaeuser Okanagan Falls; and Weyerhaeuser Vavenby.

Those are the 71 operations that we know of that have closed during the period of time after the government dismantled the appurtenancy system as we knew it. Also, another major component of that was the 20 percent takeback of every forest tenure in the province of British Columbia under the name of revitalization.

There was no connectivity between the loggers who lost their jobs and the work. So the result was that thousands of workers who had their jobs suddenly had to go begging and looking for a job because the timber they were working on was taken back by the government.

There was no program. There was compensation to the industry, but there was no corresponding plan to look after the workers and their families. Oh yeah, there have been band-aid programs by the federal government, and the government here has done what I would call token efforts in terms of doing the real job that could have been done.

We've got a forest industry in chaos. We've got absolute chaos when you look around. The forest health issues are alarming, millions of hectares of land with forest health issues, and this act is just tinkering. It's really just fiddling while Rome is burning here. It's a disaster. We've got so many problems.

One of them that we ought to be paying attention to is our forest health. Here's a government that says they care about carbon. Actually, with all of the dead and dying forests, we're developing…. Instead of a carbon sink, we're potentially creating a situation where there's going to be more carbon created in all this dead and decaying wood — you know, tonnes of carbon being released. So I am alarmed at what I'm seeing with some of these amendments.

I'm hopeful, at the same time, that some of these things may have opportunities for new industries, because there are sections in here, as it was explained to me, that they would be going from scaling to timber cruising.

Just for the 12 people at home that might be listening to this in all of British Columbia, maybe in Canada, I think it's important to note the difference between paying based on scaling and on timber cruising. In the past there was all kinds of timber cruising that went on, and I talked to old-time timber cruisers who went out. They would ribbon off an area, they would scale, and they would make sure that they were looking at a hectare of land. They would use instruments to ensure that that was the case, that they were getting a hectare of land. They would calculate the volume.

The scalers often told me that if a timber cruiser said there were 800 cubic metres of wood in a hectare and, down at the dry-land sort, when they actually scaled it, the real number came in at 700 instead of 800, invariably, those old-time timber cruisers were fairly close. But they would be right. If they were wrong by 100 cubic metres, they would be wrong, essentially, all the time. In other words, there is some truth to what they tried to….

They obviously tried to do their job, but they were extrapolating those numbers over large areas, because they would do a couple of hectares and then say that this is what the amount of timber is in each one of these hectares. Of course, timber varies by age class. It varies by the quality of the timber. Certainly, from valley bottom to the top of a mountain, there are vast changes in the value and quality of the timber that is all impacted.

[1455]

You know, I look at this act, and I just want to turn your attention to the scaling, turning from scaling to determine the volume or quality of timber and classify the quality of timber instead of scaling. Obviously, in a later process, we're going to have the opportunity to ask questions about what this means for scalers.

Are we going to lose hundreds of scalers' jobs as a result of this? Is there any consideration of that potential outcome? If there are jobs lost as a result of that, does the minister or this government have any plan to deal with those workers that could potentially be impacted by this? Or are they going to be offered the opportunity to learn how to do timber cruising instead of timber scaling?

If this side of the House were looking at this, and if I were there, I would be arguing very strongly that our job ought to be where you make changes as best as you can to mitigate those changes by taking care of people and jobs. That's one of the problems that I see with this government. There's a great concern about industry, and that's good. Yeah, we understand that industry creates jobs, but I'll tell you that without every one of those workers in the plant, right down to the guy in the cleanup….

I've often said how stupid it is, the whole system based on industry saying: "Well, we're going to value…." Each plant has to produce certain values. If you had to value the cleanup man, how do you value the cleanup man? But if he doesn't do his job and things pile up and conveyors come off, pretty soon you've got that mill plugged to the nines, and you're going to have no production coming out the other end.

So you can have an $800-a-minute sawyer, but it ain't going to be doing you any good if you don't have the cleanup man doing his job all the way down to the shop floor.

When I see this act and all these amendments, we're going to have the minister taking charge of just about anything. I'm glad he's having a relaxing day today because I think he's going to need to prepare. I think he's going to need to rest up a lot because the minister is going to be doing just about everything, according to this.

[ Page 5396 ]

Just about every page has got changes where we're going to take from the regional manager or the district manager or even the chief forester….

Apparently, our top political forest cop…. He's got all the credentials. We don't need any of those people. We don't need a chief forester anymore. We can do away with the regional manager. Why, we can even do away with just about everybody from soup to nuts because we've got the Minister of Forests, and he's going to be in charge of things and looking out for everybody and the good people of B.C. That's what they would have us believe.

Let's just look at some of the things that he's going to be doing. In the Forest Act,

section 94: "to provide that the minister, instead of the regional manager, the district manager…may grant exemptions." So he's going to be granting exemptions. Well, I guess he's got nothing better to do this afternoon. He can go in his office and grant exemptions. My goodness. We're going to have the Minister of Forests granting exemptions. That's a lot more hands-on than I think the Minister of Forests….

We ought to have people out in the field doing those jobs, instead of laying off hundreds of people. This government has been on the rampage, attacking job after job, hundreds of people in the Ministry of Forests, in compliance and in enforcement. They have hollowed out the Ministry of Forests. I'm concerned. I have to wonder if this is going to be the last Minister of Forests and Range. I'm really concerned that they're heading to some kind of natural resources ministry. Is that going to be the next announcement?

Just before the 100th anniversary of the Ministry of Forests in a couple more years, this government, tossing aside all of these experts from our forests, is headed to hollowing out the Ministry of Forests to the point where we're just going to have the Minister of Forests sitting behind his desk running things.

[1500]

It's a frightening prospect, absolutely frightening and terrifying, that we would think that we're going to have everything from…. Listen to this. By repealing this section, the minister "may exempt timber or a person from subsection (1) or (4).

(6) The minister may attach conditions to an exemption under subsection (5) and may attach, remove or alter a condition at any time." This is what the minister has the ability to do.

It is unbelievable, the list of things here. It says the person, if they're authorized by the minister…. This is the politicization of forest policy in British Columbia. That is my concern.

We're going to have the opportunity to ask questions. I'm sure the minister will be forthcoming, and we look forward to the answers on some of these things. But it is extremely concerning when you read this long list of things. A waste assessment of timber that's been approved by the minister. What? Now we've got the minister running around doing waste assessment — approved by the minister.

I guess with the right hand he's doing this, and with the left hand…. It says: "the person scales the special forest product at a scale site designated by the minister…." My goodness, he's busy. He's going to be having to run around, and he'll have to have a special big vehicle here, a big black limousine, to pull him up and roar him right…. It'll have to be four-wheel drive, because he'll be racing around all over the forest looking.

"The minister may attach conditions to an authorization granted under subsection (3)…." He may attach or alter a condition at any time. And all these are amended by striking out regional manager, district manager, forest officer. My goodness. At the end of the day there's hardly anything left for anybody else to do anything but the minister.

It really does have to make you look back at what's happened in the province of British Columbia. You know, you see this vast array of measures all being taken over by the minister. Then you look back and say: "Well, we've lost 40,100 jobs since 2000, and we look at the compliance and enforcement office. They've lost something like 250 jobs, or they've put the broad axe to 204 positions, and we hear there's some more coming."

The compliance and enforcement. Do I have this right? There were 199 people left in the entire province of British Columbia. I think that's right — 199 people left in compliance and enforcement, left to run around with their roller-skates on and check out compliance and enforcement.

This is the same government, by the way, that back in the days of heartland, when they put out their heartlands economic strategy…. Do you remember that? The new era of sustainable forestry — sustainable forestry. It was just before we shut down half the mills in the province. If you're losing track, if you need a little help with this, that was just before you shut down half the mills in the province.

We had this heartlands economic strategy and a whole new era. We were going to have revitalization, and we were going to have million-dollar fines. Million-dollar fines, the government talked about. "Boy, we're going to be tough. It's like being tough on crime. Million-dollar fines, and we're going to have thousands of enforcement and compliance. The amount that we're going to go after people…. It'll be severe, maybe even as much as a million dollars," they talked about.

You know what the reality is? The amount of fines, when we investigated this last year…. I asked for the numbers. Shock and awe or surprise of all surprises. Do you think there was a million-dollar fine, hon. Speaker? Not one. Do you think there was a half-million-dollar fine? No. If you think there was a $100,000 fine, you'd be wrong.

[1505]

[ Page 5397 ]

The best they could come up with is that they had a fine for something really outrageous, and I don't know what that would be. I don't know whether you had to have a bridge wash out or a culvert blow out and drive your logging truck through it, but if you got caught with something really, really bad, there was a fine of $19,500. That was the new fine, and they've fallen off. The money collected in fines is almost insignificant.

It's really that the foxes are in charge of the chicken coop in every way, shape and form. We've got what I would call the corporatization of forest policy in British Columbia. I worry that some corporate leader is sitting around drafting forest policy and shipping it over here and saying, "Why don't we try this, this week or this month?" because there doesn't seem to be a coherent plan to take care of the province's forests for the future.

When you look at what's happening, again, with the tree planting…. I know it's all tied together because as part of this act, there are changes that are going to allow changes for compliance and for enforcement as well as for how tenure works in its entirety. There's going to be a whole new level of tenure set up. Again, as they say, the devil is in the details.

You would hope that some of this is well-intentioned. I have to believe in my heart of hearts that nobody on the other side is going to be sitting around trying purposely to absolutely mess this up, I don't think. They just seem to be bouncing. It's kind of like going to the fair and getting on one of those cars, and you bounce from one thing to another. Let's bounce over here and bounce over there. We try something new, and it doesn't work out, so let's try something else. Well, the concern with that is that there needs to be an ongoing plan that at the end of the day results in good jobs for people in British Columbia.

I want to mention that I had the opportunity, in comparison, to compare ourselves, British Columbia. Back in 1989, I had the opportunity to go to Sweden, and they had the ability to cut 100 million cubic metres. At our highest point in the province of British Columbia I think we cut 91 million cubic metres. I think that's the largest annual cut that ever occurred in the province.

We've dropped significantly since then in terms of the annual volume, but in Sweden they were planting 500 million trees. Even in this last couple of years they're planting roughly double the amount of trees that we're planting here in British Columbia. There's something very wrong here that we're not keeping up, that we're not taking care of the forest health issues here, as they are in other parts of the world like Scandinavia, where they really do pride themselves on their forests and future forests, and they're taking care of the planting.

Again, it's not me thinking these things. I look at the website of the silviculture contractors, and they're alarmed. They're ringing the alarm bells. That's not easy for an organization to do, because that group is essentially waiting with their tin cup for money from the province to come out to allow them to do planting. Whatever work they get essentially comes from government. When they're talking about these things, we need to take them seriously.

I know my time is up. I want to thank you, hon. Speaker, for the opportunity to speak to this important matter.

M. Sather: It's my pleasure to join the second reading debate on Bill 7, Forests and Range Statutes Amendment Act, 2010. I agree with my colleague from the Cowichan Valley that this bill is more of the deregulation agenda that this government has brought in not only to forestry but to the whole of government, particularly to forestry, since they were first elected back in 2001.

[1510]

You know, it's about removing regulatory requirements for forest management, including scaling changes, redetermining stumpage rates and extending timeline management agreements. All of these kinds of things that are contained in Bill 7, including the increased new powers of the minister that my colleague referred to, are more of the same medicine that we've experienced from this government and, unfortunately, that forest workers and the communities they live in have experienced from this government over the years.

It's hard to figure out. I'm sure the Minister of Forests is a very intelligent human being and his colleagues are intelligent. [Applause.] Let's hear it for the minister.

But you've got to wonder about the ability to learn. You know what the ability to learn is, Madam Speaker? It's like when you're doing something that isn't working, you try something different. That's intelligence. That's the ability to learn. But this government is on the same…. In fact, they're recycling the old ideas that they started with in 2001 with a fervour that I haven't seen in a number of years.

It shows quite clearly a government that's run out of ideas, that's run out of energy and that's going back to the future. It's not a good thing at all for the industry, and it's not good for British Columbians.

But they have support. Indeed, they have support for the deregulation and privatization agenda that they've embarked on these many years in the forest industry.

For example, Rick Jeffery from the Coast Forest Products Association says that "environmental compliance has shifted from government regulation to customer demand." Now, isn't that sweet? You don't need any regulations in government. All you've got to do is depend upon the customer. The customer is responsible for ensuring that the health of our forests is cared for, that our forest workers are looked after. All of this is dependent on the customer because the government doesn't have any responsibility.

The government can be out of the picture. That's the way they want it, and that's the way they continue to go.

[ Page 5398 ]

So he goes on to say — Mr. Jeffery: "We have to be green. People won't buy if we're not green."

So that's how it works in today's forestry in British Columbia. You're depending on the consumer to say, "Hey, I'm not going to buy your 2-by-4s unless those are green 2-by-4s" — not green in the sense of freshly cut but green in the sense of being kind to the environment. But that's not how it works oftentimes. Usually I would expect, probably a large measure of the times when a consumer goes to Revy or RONA or wherever they go in their community to buy 2-by-4s, that they have a need for that 2-by-4.

That's what's on their mind. They're going to build a house. They're going to build a chicken coop. They may need some fence posts and some rails. I bought some recently myself — you know, supporting the Interior economy up in the Cariboo. That's what they're depending upon. Thinking that somehow the consumer drives all of the requirements that we have for forestry is a pretty outmoded kind of thinking.

It's irresponsible. It is. It's a lack of leadership. I think the government simply has to do better. I know they're struggling these days. I know they're having a hard time on a number of fronts, but still, they're going to be governing this province for at least the next three years — probably only for the next three years. So it's incumbent upon them to bring in new ideas that will revitalize the forest industry.

As the Premier is always saying — and, I'm sure, the minister agrees — it needs to be done. But clearly, it's not being done. The people of British Columbia are looking for that kind of leadership. What we've seen…. This is building upon the cuts to the Forest Practices Code. The government brought in the so-called results-based code. My colleague used the phrase, I guess: "The fox guarding the henhouse."

[1515]

That's basically what that results-based code amounts to. It's like: "You go out there, forest companies. Make sure you're doing a good job. Make sure you're protecting the land base. Make sure you're protecting the environment. Let us know how you're doing, and we'll give a check mark beside your name. Then you can carry on."

The agenda. Like I say, it's back to the future with this government. They came in saying, "We're going to get rid of one-third of all the regulations, the red tape, in this province" — you know, those nasty environmental regulations, those streamside protection regulations that were there to protect the streams out in the forests, the setbacks from streamsides that they thought were a little too lacking in flexibility.

That's another buzzword we hear from the other side a lot: "We want flexibility." You know what? "Those streamside regulations requiring a 30-metre setback or more were just a little bit too onerous, and companies need more flexibility." This government has been only too happy, too pleased, to comply with the forest companies that have been demanding that and the developers that are, in my communities, demanding that.

What we're seeing here is that same deregulation agenda, and it's nonsense. We're seeing how it doesn't work not only in this industry. We're seeing it today in the oil industry with that horrendous spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

We look at how corporations work. What is the primary purpose of a corporation: to make money. Fair enough, and so it should be their purpose, but that doesn't mean you just leave them alone, let them go home with their barrels of cash. You've got to be responsible.

It's shown that oftentimes, if you don't have the regulations…. Just look at how BP and other corporations work in other parts of the world. Look at Nigeria. Look at Ecuador. Oil spills all over the place. They don't have any regulations saying that you have to clean them up. They have a little better regulation in the States, and apparently, we do have better regulations here with regard to oil spills. But you can't just leave it up to the corporations. You can't leave it up to the forest companies.

Their job is to make money. Let them do their job, but our job as regulators, as governors, is to govern, to set some of those regulations that I know are a very bad word to members opposite. It's how we need to work together. You can't just let corporations go on unimpeded.

We've heard in the past — and we still hear them today — the promises that this government made back what they were elected first. You know: "We're going to have a leading-edge forest industry." But what they sadly and unfortunately forgot to tell British Columbians, particularly forest workers and their communities, is that it was going to be leading in job losses — tens of thousands. It was going to be leading in the shutdown of mills across this province. My colleague has read out a litany of such operations that have shut down, including one in my community of Maple Ridge. That's what "leading edge" has become.

In 2003 the government said: "We're reshaping our forest sector to restore the B.C. advantage to our province's number one industry." What is that? What reshaping have they done? What it appears to be is a cozy relationship with the heads of forest companies, whereby they say: "Whatever you want, come and ask us, and we'll give." In return, the B.C. Liberals get some pretty nice donations from the forest industry.

That may work for them politically, in some respects, but it's not working for the people in British Columbia. They're pretty concerned, as they should be, as we all should be, about the forest industry.

Bill 7 is not the medicine that's needed. It does some tinkering around the edges. There may be some things about it — if we're recovering wood waste, but then for what purpose and how that's going to be done…. I'll say

[ Page 5399 ]

a little bit more about that later. There are a couple of things around wildfire regulations that I like, and I'll talk about that. But by and large, it doesn't measure up to the need that's out there, the desperate need that's out there in the province. It simply doesn't measure up.

[1520]

What we've seen as a response is that last September the government cut $60 million from the forestry budget, and $198 million over three years is cut. I guess it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, in a way, that the forest industry is allowed to decline into chaos. Then, well, guess what. You don't have that much of a forest industry left, so why should you actually spend any money on it?

Besides, a lot of it is wasted on those civil servants, those public servants who…. As my colleague pointed out, the minister can do the job, so he figures that by this legislation, he can do the job of all those folks that have made a career out of managing the forests. He can do it, and this legislation is going to help him do that. So 29 Forests offices have been closed since 2003, and it's ongoing. We've heard about more closures from my colleagues on this side of the House this spring.

"Politicizing" is a word we heard, actually, from the Minister of Children and Families earlier today. She said that we don't want to be politicizing issues in the province. But that is, in fact, what the government is doing with this bill. I mean, it's being taken out of the hands of the professionals and put in the hands of a politician. If that's not politicizing, I'm not sure what is.

The capacity to deal with all the important forest health issues, the management of the forest industry in terms of the harvesting and how that's done, is being reduced in the ministry considerably. The minister said this spring, regarding those cuts, that a lot of that work is duplication, as professional foresters have a responsibility to ensure that the documents they sign are in full compliance.

Well, in fact, that isn't their first responsibility. That should be our responsibility. Their first responsibility is to their employer and to help their employer make a profit.

So the minister is saying — and this is the self-reporting agenda, the results-based agenda…. It's like we don't need independent people, civil servants, those not very helpful civil servants in the first place because, hey, these guys have got foresters. The forest companies have foresters in their employ, so we'll just depend on them. They can do it. When we actually have a civil servant that's looking over the shoulder, that's not very helpful. That's duplication, the minister says, so we'll just get rid of those civil servants and let the forest companies carry on apace — not good management, not at all.

Compliance and enforcement was cut by 35 percent this year over last year — not surprising and not out of keeping with…. It kind of reminds me of the doctrine that right-wing governments — and this is a right-wing government — have used for a while. If there's a crisis, that's the time to move in. It's the time to make a cut; it's the time to make the sea changes. This is what it seems to me the government is trying to do.

Yes, there has been a desperate recession that we aren't through yet by any stretch of the imagination. So now is the time to whack the public service a little harder, and what we've found with this government is that those cuts don't come back either. We've found that over year after year.

As I mentioned, this bill is taking key decisions out of the hands of public servants and putting them in the hands of the minister. We've seen that in a number of areas with this government, especially this spring, taking away the power of supposedly independent bodies like the B.C. Transmission Corporation and the utilities corporation.

[1525]

We're looking at essentially more privatization of the forests. That's what this leads to. The government has been only too happy to assist that process, turning forest companies into land developers in places that local communities didn't even want this to happen, like on the southern end of Vancouver Island. They've been brushed aside for the desire to rescue the forest companies.

But here's the difference. It's rescue the forest companies and abandon the forest workers. That's the problem with the agenda. It may work okay for Mr. Jeffery and his associates, but it's not working for the average British Columbian who depends on the forest industry for their livelihood.

Bill 7 talks about better use of low-quality timber through scaling provisions and changes for bioenergy and improving wildfire protection. The minister himself will decide whether the scaling is done right or not, whether it needs to be rechecked. Normally, prior to this bill, it would be required if the volumes of wood differed between original and the check scales by more than a certain percentage. We'd redo it. All that kind of red tape will be gone, and the minister will just go: "Oh, let me see now. I'll look at my Ouija board, and I'll decide here what needs to be done."

It's very unprofessional. It's an abandonment, I believe, of the management of the forests. Why give the minister all this power? Why does the government want the minister to have all this power? Is it to hand out more goodies to friends and insiders, or is it to cut back on the hated — let's not say hated; I'll say not particularly embraced — civil service? Or is it both?

The minister gets to be able to give to those that he finds most deserving. Those kind of bothersome, sometimes, civil servants, because they do have some professional standards, of course, that they have to adhere to…. I'm sure they upset the minister and his help by saying that things are not all done the way they should be from time to time. Those that are left, that is, are saying that.

[ Page 5400 ]

The province doesn't have a good grasp of the timber supply and the annual allowable cut. It's those kinds of basic issues that we need to have in place before this kind of tinkering, really…. It's the time to do it. It's the time to do it when you have the basics in place. Then move forward. But we're kind of going backwards, it seems to me, with some of the thrust of this legislation and the tens of thousands of job losses I have mentioned and no real changes to assist affected forestry workers or to make any real changes to the way we do forestry in B.C.

Now, one thing that the government — the Finance Minister and others — have talked about…. The HST, though, is going to be a boon to forest companies, apparently to the tune of $140 million in tax relief.

[C. Trevena in the chair.]

What's going to happen with that $140 million? Is that money really going to be reinvested in British Columbia? We always hear that British Columbians and British Columbia lag in productivity, but productivity is determined in large measure by business investment. That, I don't think, is what we're seeing. In fact, that's what the figures show — that we're not seeing solid business reinvestment in our province.

We've seen Canfor invest in new mills down in the States, but we're not seeing that here. Americans, now that they have a new president who is looking, I think, a lot more than the previous one at the particular needs of their country…. They've got an America-first policy.

We don't have anything representing a B.C.-first policy. It seems like our first job is to make sure that corporations are doing as well as they possibly can, and the rest of the people have to just find their way, stumble along, try to make a living, not with a lot of help or understanding or direction by this government.

So the forest industry is being abandoned. Forest health is threatened by pests and wildfire. We know a lot about the beetle outbreak, but it's not just the pine beetle. Fir trees are being attacked — spruce, even willows, aspen.

[1530]

They're all having new attacks that are largely — as is understood, anyway — climate change–related. This is not going away. Climate change is not going away.

Wildfires. Despite the fact that the ministry has a much smaller budget…. I think it's $53 million this year for fighting wildfires, and it was something like $400-plus million last year. The Minister of Environment is saying very openly, and I think the Minister of Forests has acknowledged in recent comments, that we're looking at another dry, hot summer most likely in British Columbia.

It's already really dry in the Cariboo. It's dry in the minister's hometown. I mean, there are already forest fires in Prince George. So we're looking at more problems with our forests in terms of the wildfires and in terms of the beetle outbreaks, but we're not seeing a response that's going to be adequate to deal with the disaster that's really looming out there. It's not only looming; it's underway in the forest industry and in the forests right now.

There's actually an opportunity to address forest health, to conserve biodiversity and to use our forests to fight climate change, and that's being lost, I think. Instead…. I want to talk a bit about bioenergy, because Bill 7 talks about allowable annual cut partitions for the purpose of bioenergy and so on.

What I would like to see is a fulsome discussion about bioenergy, because from what I've read about bioenergy, it seems to me that it's not clear at all as to the efficacy or the desirability of proceeding with bioenergy. Is bioenergy a net benefit in the fight against climate change? I think that's one of the discussions that we should be having.

We know about the beetle-kill wood. If you go into the Interior, you'll see it everywhere that there are pine trees, and that's a lot of the interior of our province. But you can't compare fossil fuels. You see, that's the idea of bioenergy, the usual purpose. It's supposed to make us more green, to get away from using fossil fuels and to get into using other sources of energy — in this case, wood. There are other forms of bioenergy, of course, but in this case we're looking at wood.

You can't compare, though, burning wood for bioenergy with fossil fuels without a full-cost accounting of both sources. In the case of bioenergy, you have to account for the carbon used in obtaining the wood, from disturbing the soil and from burning the wood, so it's a several-part process. It's not just burning the wood where carbon is released, and wood has a quarter to a third the energy intensity of fossil fuels.

We know that fossil fuels are fossils. Coal is very heavily compacted over the millennia, and it's very dense in terms of an energy source, and the same thing with liquid fossil fuels. Therefore, there's more carbon dioxide per unit of energy produced that comes from burning wood as comes from burning fossil fuels.

All of this that I'm talking about is not to say necessarily that fossil fuels are better. I'm just saying that we need to have a discussion, and we fully need to understand where we're going with bioenergy and what we're likely to get out of it or not.

The energy costs to retrieve wood are high, and that's why the kinds of bioenergy uses that we have now are usually at the point where the wood is being used for something else, like chips that have been a by-product of a mill may be burned. But when you take in all the costs of having to cut the wood in the forest and transport it, there's a lot of energy released there.

[1535]

Bioenergy is not carbon-neutral. I think sometimes folks might think that it is. It in fact takes several decades to cover the emissions from the use of wood. Wood is bioenergy, I want to clarify.

[ Page 5401 ]

The carbon losses in the use of bioenergy, the carbon emissions, are not just in the burning. Clearcutting decreases carbon stocks by about a hundred tonnes per hectare. So what you have is that below ground…. People don't realize, I don't think, that there's a lot of carbon stored in the soil, and a lot of that…. It's all decaying, virtually. That's the process of respiration, and that exceeds the photosynthesis that's occurring, which is severely reduced, of course, if you remove the trees.

Even with replanting of trees, it takes eight to ten years to achieve carbon neutrality at that particular site — there in the forest. There's a lot of complexity to the issue of using wood for bioenergy.

You know, in those beetle-killed forests, as traumatic as they are…. The pine is the one species, often the dominant tree species in the forest, but those forests are not dead when the tree dies, when the pine dies. You often have or nearly always have some other species. If not another tree like aspen or fir, you will have shrubs. You'll have juniper and various kinds of willow and birch and others that are growing there. The thing about it, too, to remember is the soil is still intact, so all that carbon is being held there in the soil.

The last thing I want to talk a little bit about is the wildfire issue. This bill will allow forest companies, apparently, to recover more costs associated with fighting wildfires, and I look forward to hearing from the minister more about what that's about. I don't want to see just more money flowing from the government to forest companies, but it may be, in fact, a good thing.

I know a couple of things that I saw, I did like with regard to the wildfire.

Section 21 is a prohibition against starting a fire on grasslands, not just risking starting a fire. I think that's good — to make those that are responsible, if you can possibly catch them…. There are lots of signs out there in the province to report arsonists, and that's a good thing. So anyone that's found to have started a fire on grasslands — and I guess that will apply also to the forest base — will be held accountable, as I understand.

The other thing. If an individual got paid for fire control costs but was found to have been responsible for the fire, they have to pay it back. You know, there's lots of anecdotal evidence, at least, of folks going out to start forest fires so that they can get a job. That's kind of sad that someone would have to do that or think they have to do that. Nobody has to do that, and no one should do that.

If they, in fact, do that, and they certainly then are actually found to have been the cause of the fire, it's only right that they should be required to pay that back. This bill will do that. That's a good thing.

Overall, I would say that it's the wrong direction for the government. We're not looking at the big picture here. We're dealing, it seems to me, with more centralization in the minister's office, more deregulation, putting the forest base at greater risk, instead of bringing in some greater innovation that would help us to revitalize the forest industry in a true way and to deal with the reality of climate change. Again, that speaks to things like bioenergy from wood.

We have to have, in my opinion — and I'd sure like to see — a wider discussion about that. With that, I will take my seat and allow my colleague to have his say.

J. Rustad: I'm pleased to take a few moments of time to rise to speak to Bill 7, the Forests and Range Statutes Amendment Act, 2010. This is an interesting act. It actually does a number of things — some housecleaning, increases some opportunities.

[1540]

I find it interesting listening to the opposition. They go on and on about more power coming into the ministry. By simply changing the text of…. For example, in

section 10, it says: "'…a regional manager, district manager or forest officer' and substituting 'the minister.'" That's simply a way of cleaning it up to say that the ministry does the actual application or what have you, whatever it may be.

Those positions, over time, may change — what their name is, how they…. Then you'd have to come back into the House and change it if you were to specifically label a position. Simply by saying it's a part of the ministry does not mean the minister is making those decisions. It means the ministry is making those decisions.

However, that's okay. I understand them going on about these sorts of things. But the member for Cowichan Valley went on and created — you know, announced — a long list of mill closures and stuff. I know the member for Cowichan Valley is new here. He was just elected last year. I wonder if the member for Cariboo North, actually, might be taking him under his wing, because the member for Cariboo North is famous for saying that the sky is falling, and apparently, now the member for Cowichan Valley is saying the exact same thing. It's quite interesting.

But the interesting side out of all of that….

Interjections.

Deputy Speaker: Members.

J. Rustad: I see I've hit a bit of a raw nerve about saying the sky is falling.

The interesting thing is that there has been a significant change in this province over the last year. A lot of optimism has come in. The member for Cowichan Valley had a debate with me this morning about this, and you know what? He stood up and agreed. He said: "Yes, there are some positive signs happening in the forest industry." Yet to hear the speech today…. The listeners out there should actually go and compare this morning's speech to this afternoon's speech, because clearly, he was saying two totally different things.

[ Page 5402 ]

I just want to give another list here: Babine Forest Products; Decker Lake Forest Products; Conifex in Fort St. James; Conifex in Mackenzie; Silver Dew Hardwoods in Clearwater; the Tolko mill in Kelowna; Western, in Sumas and Port Alberni; Canfor, adding second shifts; Interfor in Castlegar; Springer Creek Forest Products in Slocan; Canfor in Quesnel; and, of course, Harmac. Many of the mills in my riding have gone from work-share to double shifts.

All of those mills that I just mentioned share one thing in common. They've reopened. It's amazing. They've reopened. Matter of fact, what is great about this is not only have they reopened, but companies are investing. They're expanding their productivity line and adding shifts. And $45 million is being spent on the Canfor operation in Fort St. John. Another $20 million is being spent in Chetwynd, and $5 million, $10 million just recently in Fort St. James at the Conifex mill. That's on top of the additional $30 million being spent.

Pinnacle Pellet just spent $30 million building a new pellet plant south of Prince George. They're looking at spending that much or more on a new pellet plant in Burns Lake. There's another pellet plant that was just built in Vanderhoof.

It's pretty clear that what is being described on the other side as the sky falling, quite frankly, has changed dramatically. We're seeing the forest industry starting to be revived, and it's interesting to see.

The member for Cowichan Valley also talked about the unemployment rate, the unemployment from this. It might be interesting to note that at no time in this downturn has the unemployment rate actually risen above the lowest unemployment level that there was in the entire 1990s. The entire 1990s had a higher unemployment level than the worst level during the recession. I find that very interesting, and it speaks volumes to what is happening in this province and the reality, as opposed to the sky is falling and what these members are trying to paint. I find it very interesting.

The member for Cowichan Valley talked and said that the forest industry is in chaos, and he was just livid. I was reminded by the member next door to me that he actually enjoyed listening to him, because when he gets going, his volume goes up. Of course, he's a little hard of hearing, so it makes it a lot easier for him to hear what's being said in the House.

Having said that, like I say, go back and compare what he said this morning about optimism changing in the forest industry, about opportunities. Compare it to that speech. Clearly, somebody just gave him a speech and he came up here and parroted it, because he obviously didn't compare it to his notes this morning.

I want to talk particularly about one section. Bill 7 talks about the scaling of special forest products. Members went on ad nauseam about the idea that it's going to dramatically change and take away the scaling.

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This is about special forest products. This is about designing the opportunity to take waste wood on a landing, to be able to utilize that waste wood, to be able to either assess it there or bring it to another area to be assessed, to be able to utilize it for special forest products such as, perhaps, chip for pulps or perhaps going in for biofuels or perhaps going in for pellets.

It's amazing, when you actually stop and read the act as opposed to just going off on a rant and trying to spend time in the afternoon. The member just before me from Maple Ridge–Pitt Meadows went on at length. He spent half an hour in here, and he spent five minutes in total actually talking about the bill. If that's what the members want to do in terms of the debate time that's in this House…. We have lots of important things to talk about, and I can tell you that the forest industry is very important to talk about. But perhaps a little bit of focusing on what's actually before them, as opposed to just going on and railing.

The members opposite also talk about forest health and the challenges that we have with pine beetle. All the members opposite have to do is look in the mirror to understand what's happened with pine beetle and why we got to where we got to. It was in the 1990s that decisions were made that created some of the challenges, but having said that, we need to move forward. That was a decade ago. We need to move forward, and we need to create the right environment to be able to utilize that fibre today.

Talk about tree planting. As the parliamentary secretary for silviculture, of course I'm quite concerned about what we need to be doing in the province. That's what I'm being focused on and doing work on. When you're talking about tree planting, the number of trees in this province being planted has declined. Madam Speaker, when you used to log 80 million cubic metres and now you're logging under 50 million cubic metres, guess what. You're going to plant fewer trees. It's simple math. I understand that the opposition doesn't understand math, but that's just the way she is.

The other thing I find absolutely amazing….

Interjections.

Deputy Speaker: Would all members give the member who is speaking the opportunity to continue speaking. There will be opportunities for every member to participate in this debate in their own time.

Please continue, Member.

J. Rustad: The members opposite were talking about fines and fines happening in the forest industry. They wanted to see these great big fines. Well, when companies are doing the right thing, when work is being done properly in the forest, why would there be fines? They seem to think that the measure of success in the forest

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industry is if companies are being fined. Strange how that picture is painted.

This act does a number of things in terms of housecleaning. It sets out some important provisions that help fuel things like the bio-industry that we have in the province, the importance around there, and it helps to build on what we're trying to do in this province, which is to build a positive environment to be able to allow the forest industry to go through the changes it needs to, to be able to help to support it and to be able to ultimately make a healthier industry coming forward.

You go and talk to the forest industry today, you go and talk to the companies today, and they're optimistic about the future. You know what's important about talking to those people? You don't have forestry workers if you don't have a company. You don't have the opportunity for ma-and-pop operations. You don't have the opportunity for union workers. You don't have the opportunity for those people to be able to create jobs, to be able to support their families, to be able to support communities, unless you have the structure in place that is actually going to do that.

What we are trying to do is trying to make that as supportive and as strong as possible so that this province can continue to see forestry as a backbone, continue to see it as what's critical for building communities and continue to see it supporting families, in particular, throughout rural B.C.

H. Lali: I rise in this chamber to take my place in the debate on Bill 7, the Forests and Range Statutes Amendment Act. I started looking at the act. There's a lot in here that's still left unsaid, and I think the first question I asked myself was: "What was the minister thinking?" What was the Minister of Forests and Range thinking? Does the Minister of Forests and Range really know what he's doing?

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At first I thought: "He doesn't know what he's doing." That was my first impression that I got in terms of actually looking at this bill. But then I started thinking that no, he knows exactly what he's doing. He knows exactly what he's doing, and I'll lay it out here, right here in this House in front of you why it is that the minister knows exactly what he's doing and his real intent behind this amendment act that is here before us.

Just before us we had the hon. member for Nechako Lakes. I think that's his riding. You know, those comments can't be just left unsaid. It tells you, when listening to the hon. member, how brainwashed he seems to be and how reluctant he is to look at the realities of what is actually taking place in British Columbia and what has taken place now historically since 2001, since the Liberal government has taken office. He just doesn't see…. He's talking about how forestry is doing great, how it's coming back.

The reality is that in the last nine years and some months now — starting in their tenth year — in the province of British Columbia under this B.C. Liberal government there have been 75 sawmills and pulp mills and veneer plants that have closed under this government.

The other reality is that 35,000 family-supporting jobs have been eliminated by two things from this government. One, because of their do-nothing policy to actually face the problems that arise, whether it's the pine beetle issue that is there or the softwood sellout. They made a secret deal with Prime Minister Harper and the federal Conservatives. That's on the one side. Then the punitive policies of this government that have hurt communities that have workers and have allowed this massive consolidation of timber rights into the hands of a few corporations — friends of the B.C. Liberal Party. That's the reality.

We talked about the 75 sawmill and pulp mills. It doesn't speak about the dozens and dozens of small operations in every constituency, in every timber supply area across this province — the small-scale salvage operators, who owned operations anywhere from a million to, perhaps, even up to $10 million, employing anywhere from three or four workers up to 25, 30, 40 workers — and the value-added remanufacturing sector, which has been decimated by both the punitive policies of this government and the do-nothing attitude of this government.

They put forward this Bill 7, the Forests and Range Statutes Amendment Act, which is going to worsen that situation. I haven't even talked about the small business forest enterprise program, SBFEP. Under previous administrations under the Social Credit and the NDP, the governments of the day were obligated to actually turn a certain portion of the annual allowable cut towards the SBFEP program and also for the value-added remanufacturers and the small-scale salvage operators as well.

All three decimated by deliberate policy, punitive policy of this government to take what little timber they had in their hands away from them and actually give it to their corporate buddies, who were consolidating. And now what is it? I think it's over 90 percent of the timber in this province — the timber rights, the cutting permits, the annual allowable cut — that's in the hands of the friends of this B.C. Liberal government, and that trend continues.

Let's look at some of the details that have been put forward by the minister. I mean, most of the changes actually here in this bill appear to be removing regulatory requirements for forest management, which includes scaling changes, redetermining stumpage rates and extending timelines and management agreements.

This all fits, actually, with the deregulation of the forest industry, the oversight that the B.C. Liberals have been actually doing for the past seven to eight years and removing regulatory responsibilities from forest companies

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that have existed for generations. At the same time they've been undermining and cutting the capacity at the ministry.

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You know, it's a deliberate policy. On the one side, you see the massive giveaways to their friends in the corporate sector and forestry megagiants. On the other side, you see the capacity in the Ministry of Forests — those very folks who are actually out there, who are the oversight, who are able to be out there in the field to see if the companies were overcutting, who are out there to see that the forest was being managed in a responsible way….

They were also responsible for a lot of things that the Ministry of Environment had the agreements for between the Ministry of Environment and the Ministry of Forests, because the folks were there, employed within the ministry departments in each one of the timber supply areas.

Just to give you an example, in the Cascades timber supply area — which is Lillooet and Merritt combined — a few years back there were 109 FTEs, in 2001. These 109 people, their job…. They were the stewards of our forest. They managed our forest. They managed our forestry sector. They managed the forest resource. They managed all the cutting permits, oversaw the silviculture and everything that is related to forestry and the environment. They were able to do that.

They cut the FTEs — this is an old figure; now it's actually gone down below that — from 109 down to 49, less than half. Almost 60 percent of the FTEs were cut, and now they've removed the three positions in Princeton, in my constituency. They're also removing two positions in Lillooet as well. So it just goes down.

The capacity of the stewards of our forest industry, which is the department of forestry, is being systematically dismantled by this Liberal government. Yet they're turning over this regulatory responsibility, the oversight, to the fox — who is in charge of the henhouse — and that's to the very companies, the big forestry giants. This is just a continuation of that.

Also, changes in Bill 7 here actually continue the politicization of the forest practices by putting key decisions in the hands of the minister and taking it away from the public servants.

You know, in this province — as indeed in other provinces, but here in this province we're talking about Ministry of Forests — we have some of the best professionals in the business, who have historically worked from generations on and continue on, right here in British Columbia. What this government, what this minister, is doing is taking all that responsibility for oversight and for making sure that the regulations are being followed out of the hands of the objective Ministry of Forests officials and consolidating it in his own hands — the minister.

This is what this bill does. Just the same way all the timber is being consolidated in the hands of the big forestry giants, the big four companies in this province, the minister is now taking that responsibility into his own hands while the oversight part of it is given to the forest companies — the friends of this Liberal government who finance their election campaigns.

This is what's going on here, right here in this province, as they continue to cut the capacity of the ministry itself. I'll bet you in the future the minister will use this as an excuse to say: "You officials in the Ministry of Forests don't have all those responsibilities anymore that you had for the regulatory framework. I've given them away to forest companies or consolidated them into my own hands." In the future you're going to see some more rationalizing, which is basically cutting more jobs in the department of forestry itself.

Like I said, in the Cascades timber supply area we've seen from 109 down to 49 FTEs, lowered even further in this last round of cuts. You watch when the next year's budget comes down. The minister and the Finance Minister are going to use the excuse to say, "Well, they don't have enough to do anymore," because the forest companies are doing it or the minister has got that responsibility now. "So give a few more people their pink slips, because they're not needed." This is what's going to happen.

Then changes in Bill 7 also seem to be in line with the B.C. Liberal government's abandonment of the forest industry — I talked about that a little earlier — and also transfer of oversight for forest practices from the Crown to private forest companies. Again, the fox in charge of the henhouse.

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Now, also according to the Liberals, the changes in Bill 7, they say, will encourage better use of low-quality timber for bioenergy purposes and also improve wildfire protection. Some of the changes to the scaling provisions of the Forest Act will supposedly encourage utilization of low-grade timber and wood waste for bioenergy purposes, as I've stated.

If you look at the