John Chilibeck
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
The Daily Gleaner
Michelle Conroy says she appreciates all the work the province’s firefighters have put into protecting Miramichi, as wildfires raged out of controljust north of the city for the better part of last month.
But the Progressive Conservative MLA for Miramichi East also wonders if their employer, the Department of Natural Resources, might have unintentionally made conditions in the forests worse by encouraging herbicide spraying so that New Brunswick’s powerful timber industry could have softwood plantations.
“When we kill the broadleaf and replace hardwood with softwood, pine needles burn faster, they burn hotter,” she said during a session of the standing committee on climate change and environmental stewardship at the legislature last week. “I’ve thrown pine trees in fire pits and seen how fast they burn.”
The idea that the ecosystem could had been thrown “out of balance,” in Conroy’s words, was addressed by Deputy Minister Cade Libby.
“Your comment is one we’ve heard quite a few times, especially this summer as we’ve experienced and come through probably one of the larger fire seasons that we’ve seen,” Libby said.
“Yes, herbicides target broad-leafed plants and it’s to reduce that competition out there. But I will say this: a working forest is a great way to mitigate forest fire risk.”
The deputy minister said timber cutters use forestry roads that act as fire breaks and that they work on parcels of land that have forests of various types and age classes that have less fuel load than virgin, old-growth forests do.
Chris Norfolk, the assistant deputy minister, told Conroy he had looked at different inventories of New Brunswick’s woods over the years. The oldest he found, the first comprehensive inventory of its type, showed that in New Brunswick in 1954, about 43 per cent of the woods were primarily softwood.
Today, that figure sits at 43.5 per cent, not much different than 71 years ago, despite the use of herbicide spraying, tree planting and modern silviculture practices.
He acknowledged at a local level that can look very different some plantations have virtually no hardwood because of efforts to eradicate it, whereas in the past forests that were primarily softwood also had hardwoods mixed in.
And Norfolk admitted he wasn’t sure what burns fastest – the natural Acadian forest, which has 32 native species of trees, versus pure softwood plantations.
Most of the research on forest fires and what burns fastest and hottest has been conducted in Central and Western Canada, the official said.
“We need a better understanding how our local fuel types, including plantations and other areas that have received silviculture, how they behave when we experience forest fire conditions like the ones we’ve experienced this summer,” Norfolk said.
To that end, the department has received conditional funding from Ottawa over the next couple of years, in partnership with the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre, to study the problem through what Norfolk called aliving lab model.
Herbicide spraying in New Brunswick’s public woods is a hot topic. The chemicals have been widely applied over the past decades by timber firms, the railways, the military and the public electrical utility NB Power to kill unwanted vegetation on vast tracts. Some people fear they could harm humans and wildlife.
The officials told the committee that the timber and paper industries need herbicides to keep costs in line. Often called New Brunswick’s cornerstone industry, wood products are worth more than $3 billion in annual exports. The industry, directly and indirectly, employs about 26,000 people, often in smaller communities where jobs are otherwise scarce.
The department officials said they followed Health Canada’s lead on herbicides. Its studies show that if the spray products are used according to the label, they are safe.
In addition, the province has put on extra layers of safety to try to address public concerns. For instance, it recently increased the setback for aerial spraying from homes from 155 metres to 500 metres, although a request by the all-party committee in 2021 for it to be a one-kilometre setback has been ruled out.
The officials pointed out that companies are forced to post signs stating when they sprayed on trails that lead into the woods. About 15,000 hectares are re-planted and sprayed each year, at a cost of $3 million to taxpayers. To put that in perspective, one football field is about one hectare.
Companies that operate in the woods say the chemicals help because they prevent unwanted vegetation from growing, and they’re much cheaper to apply than physically cutting and removing all that plants.
For example, timber firms use them in selected areas to help a new tree stand grow to a certain height without facing competition from what they consider weeds. Newly planted areas are generally sprayed once, sometimes twice as red maples are harder to kill than most deciduous trees.
Rail companies apply them to clear the sides of tracks, to prevent accidents and wildfires.
NB Power once was a big user of glyphosate underneath its nearly 28,000 kilometres of powerlines but since 2023, it has discontinued the use of glyphosate-based herbicides. However, it continues to use other herbicides in limited quantities along transmission rights of way.
Still, herbicide opponents are frustrated that some recommendations made by the committee four years ago are only now being acted upon. A study that was supposed be done within 12 months comparing the cost of herbicide spraying with manual cutting won’t be completed till March 2027. That’s a six-year timeline.
“I would like them to explain why they didn’t do the work we asked them to do,” Green MLA Megan Mitton told reporters afterwards. “The cost-benefit analysis and how to do that transition is really important.”
Natural Resources Minister John Herron, who sat listening during the committee session, told journalists that his Liberal government had only been in power 10 months.
“We’ve made some progress over the last couple of months,” he said. “I come from a background or tradition where legislators and parliaments matter and giving proper attention to legislatures and committee reports is the work of government. Having more speed, having more fulsome answers is a good thing.”
However, Herron defended the use of herbicide spraying, saying he’d follow the science. He did not explain why his department had refused to increase setbacks from homes to one kilometre, one of the committee’s demands, only pointing out that the biggest timber firm in New Brunswick, J.D. Irving, Limited, had told him it already uses a one-kilometre minimum setback.
He said he hadn’t spoken to other timber firms about the issue and didn’t know what kind of setbacks they use.
