International Trade committee  That's an excellent question, Mr. Easter. There are so many avenues I could pursue, but the skills challenge is one. Jean-Michel has covered that, so I won't go there. I didn't get a chance to fully talk about transportation and some of the challenges there in getting our pr

International Trade committee  That's an excellent question. I have neglected—and it's totally my fault—to formally introduce you to Isabelle Des Chênes. She is our vice-president responsible for the trade file. She worked with our member companies and the government to help promote, through the LEAF program

International Trade committee  It has been a problem for a long time. By the very nature of the forest product industry, as you can imagine, the trees are not close to urban centres. Like grain and mining materials, they tend to be at the end of railway lines, or far out in remote areas. The phrase we use is

International Trade committee  Yes. Rail is important. Some of our friends would say that if you have a highway close to town, then you're not a captive customer. Well, that may be theoretically correct, but 8,000 trucks coming out of Kapuskasing on Highway 11 in Ontario is just not practical.

International Trade committee  The short answer is that if it's not economic to ship, our shippers won't ship it. If the customer is willing to pay a price to extract and process the newsprint, certainly we can meet much more demand than we're meeting right now. The initial national tariff on newsprint comin

International Trade committee  It's an excellent question. It's not unique to the Indian market, obviously. At the risk of sounding like I'm repeating myself, the whole premise behind the Vision 2020 exercise of our members in the Forest Products Association of Canada is to move to that next level of value-add

International Trade committee  The government has been very helpful in the past number of years already and we're on a journey. Not to get too technical, but in IFIT, the investments in forest industry transformation program, the first $100 million went out to the marketplace and companies were encouraged to a

International Trade committee  We actually have made this request as part of our budget submission to the Minister of Finance in his round of budget consultations right now. The first $100 million has not been fully announced yet. We understand there are very exciting projects in there, but because of commerci

International Trade committee  Yes. I don't think it's country specific. I think it's for all forest products coming in.

International Trade committee  Yes. I'd be glad to share it.

International Trade committee  I get the impression that the welcome wears off relatively quickly.

International Trade committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. Thank you very much, members of the committee, for the opportunity to present to you for the first time. I have been pleased to be the president of the Forest Products Association of Canada for 92 days, not that I'm counting. It's a great experien

Finance committee  The time I didn't use on the last one I may use on this one. The rail companies have reached out to some of our members, but the Forest Products Association, through my colleague, Catherine Cobden, tried on a number of occasions to come up with an agreement that would be accepta

Finance committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Hoback. That's an excellent question. I think it's a challenge for all of Canada and all industries with the aging demographics of baby boomers, but particularly in the forestry sector. Because we did face those down periods due to layoffs, our workforc

Finance committee  Not to go over sad news, but there were a series of severe hits on the forestry sector, broadly defined, in the last number of years, beginning with the change in the way people read their newspapers or read their newspapers online. The newsprint sector was hit. U.S. housing st