Natural Resources committee  Yes, sure. Just to dive in on your bridge thing, that's another place where the Canadian Wood Council has identified a real market opportunity—bridges in Canada. There are hundreds and hundreds of bridges across this country up for replacement. Wood could be a good alternative i

Natural Resources committee  I'd just like to say something. We're not essentially saying that a building has to be made all out of wood, or all out of concrete, or all out of steel. Smart guys are figuring out that by using hybrids or combinations of these materials, we can engineer all kinds of things.

Natural Resources committee  I'd just like to say that we have world-class research at the National Research Council and at Carleton University in these fire-related kinds of things, so we should be engaging our firefighter friends in getting them familiar with that kind of research and maybe getting involve

Natural Resources committee  Those programs are very well thought out. One thing we could improve upon is being able to access them in a time- and cost-efficient manner. Quite often, some of these programs require a lot of paperwork to make your application, get selected, and be able to get the money. Stream

Natural Resources committee  Perhaps I could just add to that. I have another hat, as a director of the Canadian Wood Council. We have done extensive research. When you talk about construction up to six floors, we have changes now to the national building code that provinces have been adopting. Here in Brit

Natural Resources committee  What I would say is that we have a very rigorous process around building codes. We need to ensure that we continue to do the research and development in support of building codes, to make sure building codes are designed in a way that supports safe buildings with any kind of mate

Natural Resources committee  Sure. The Species at Risk Act has a very big impact on the certainty of supply and the cost of supply. That's a federal statute. It is not a terribly well-written federal statute. Socio-economic impacts do not get considered in the development of species-at-risk plans and recove

Natural Resources committee  Sure. With respect to NAFTA, as you may know, softwood lumber resides outside of NAFTA. Right now we are embroiled in a legal dispute with the Department of Commerce on softwood lumber. There have been no discussions about bringing softwood inside of NAFTA at this point in time.

Natural Resources committee  Yes, sure. First and foremost, let me say that governments of all stripes that have dealt with this issue have taken it very seriously and done a very good job to represent Canada's interest in softwood lumber. It is not a partisan issue. It is an issue that is incredibly import

Natural Resources committee  Like any business, we need to make sure that we have a diversity of products coming out of our forests. Our forests produce things such as slough for flowers and mushrooms for export. People use our forests for recreation and tourism. We produce solid wood products, pulp and pape

Natural Resources committee  I'll just pile on to that. We've made a very big business in Japan using light-frame construction. We introduced it 40 years ago. There was no market for that in Japan. However, one of its selling features is that properly designed wood buildings have very good seismic character

Natural Resources committee  Let me say that one of the things I mentioned in my introductory comments was that Canada and British Columbia and all of the provinces have world-class forest management practices. One of the foundations of those forest management practices is on the reforestation side, where we

Natural Resources committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It's my pleasure to be here for the second time. I hope your vote went okay the other day. I'm going to start off by basically talking about the supply chain, the forest supply chain. It's relevant in respect of talking about secondary supply chain prod

International Trade committee  I don't at this point in time.

International Trade committee  Yes. We met regularly with the Province of British Columbia and the International Trade folks along the way to be briefed. We also met with DFATD officials along the way as well.