International Trade committee  We ship $1.4 billion worth of product to Japan every year, and $935 million of that is wood products. There may be some small amounts of raw stuff going there, but certainly none of our members, and I'm not aware of any... It's primarily a lumber market, so even of that $935 mill

International Trade committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It is always a pleasure to appear before you to share our views. It is a pleasure to be here today to present on the Canada-Japan trade partnership. If you looked at our testimony over the past five years or so, you would see that the industry has gone

International Trade committee  Your riding is not unique, unfortunately.

International Trade committee  Certainly it is something that has affected the industry across the country. So I'm talking to all employees in the industry, all 240,000 people who continue to be employed in the industry. I would say that that these deals help to diversify our markets. It gets us away from our

International Trade committee  Absolutely. We know from looking at this particular deal that about $20 million in product goes to Jordan from Canada. It's a marketplace of nearly $400 million. The bulk of it is in the form of paper, which comes from Quebec, and lumber, which comes from British Columbia. Both

International Trade committee  Definitely, for all regions; you have to remember that this is a global market, so when you open up market share in one part of the world, even though it may benefit directly one region of our country, that tends to move product away from where that could have gone elsewhere. I

International Trade committee  I'm going to take an environmental approach to this. I can't speak to the human rights side of things, but I can speak from our experience in the environment. Forest products, for a long time, were not exactly produced in the most sustainable fashion. Then along came something

International Trade committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. It is a real pleasure to be here today to testify on Bill C-23. Thank you very much, on behalf of the Forest Products Association of Canada. We're the national trade association that represents Canada's lumber, pulp, and paper producers across the countr

International Trade committee  Yes, the building side of things would--OSB and plywood. That's where the tariff is, and they would benefit the most. As I say, we're selling somewhere in the $300 million area into the EU right now. It's a marketplace of $23 billion in forest products in general, and we are faci

International Trade committee  I'm not so sure there's any benefit from the agreement itself in that regard. You're exactly right that the Finnish government sort of undertook a forest industry strategy many years ago, whereby they decided they were going to devote significant resources to the industry to make

International Trade committee  The industry needs the markets to sell the primary products to. You are exactly right that moving up the value chain would be very welcome. It would bring more jobs. The problem is that you have to decide what value chain you want to move up on. It's unlikely that Canadians are

International Trade committee  As I was saying to Mr. Holder, it's a significant market, but it is not the largest one for us. First comes the United States, and then China, and Asia in general. Europe assures us a market of $1.4 billion. It's a significant market, but our industry represents $56 billion a yea

International Trade committee  You are completely right. Just having free trade with all the other countries is not the only solution. But these are really big markets, and we need the markets to sell our products, that's for sure. The other point you mentioned is true. We are looking to become a leading sect

International Trade committee  The U.S. market has been a very difficult marketplace for us for the past couple of years, for obvious reasons. The housing market has sort of gone in that tank, and that was our mainstay. Our share of the U.S. marketplace used to be well up over 75%. It's down to about 65% now,

International Trade committee  No. In fact you could make the case that the softwood lumber agreement, while not the most perfect agreement by any stretch, actually helped us during the recession because it guaranteed us a market share, and we were able to keep selling into that marketplace. But I think it doe