Thanks for all the great suggestions, it's finally working whereby a double and single quotes around the rsync -e var, got it over the line as seen here -

ssh -o ConnectTimeout=10 -i /home/ec2-user/.ssh/remote.pem [email protected] \
-q -t 'find /var/log/ -type f -print0' \
| parallel -j 5 -0 rsync -aPvv -e "'ssh -i /home/ec2-user/.ssh/remote.pem'" \
[email protected]:'{}' /home/ec2-user/local_log/