Natural Resources committee  I don't have a number for you but I think things are very optimistic. The forest industry had a real challenge when oil and gas was booming because a lot of people moved over into that sector. Now, with oil prices dropping, a lot of mills are able to restaff with skilled workers

Natural Resources committee  There's quite a story too around the growing of wood and the capturing of carbon, the harvesting of wood, and the energy consumption in making wood products as compared to steel and concrete. Another huge story is seismic activity. If you look at homes, I think there are example

Natural Resources committee  I'll make it quick. A tree is made of carbon, and you can get everything out of a tree that you can get out of oil. I think the opportunity is to take the approach, as Mr. Baker talked about, of a biorefinery, in which you start by taking all of the aspects of a tree, and you tu

Natural Resources committee  On the first question, you're right. As I mentioned, J.D. Irving and other companies, the folks I represent, own about three million hectares, but they also manage an additional 50 million hectares of public land. What they do in all cases is manage all those pieces as a unit, so

Natural Resources committee  Well, the connection between my members and softwood lumber is the price of the log. If you have to pay a portion of your income from lumber in order to pay a softwood lumber duty, it reduces the value of the lumber or increases the costs, I guess, depending on how you look at it

Natural Resources committee  Their interest is to make sure that when those conversations start, the perspective of private landowners is part of that conversation, and they understand what the issues are in terms of what the private landowners are dealing with. That's the extent of their interest. How that

Natural Resources committee  We haven't been in the past, which is why I raised it. It would be great if we had some support to have input into it, but I don't know if we will or not.

Natural Resources committee  Thanks for the question. First of all, I agree with Mr. Baker completely that the resources from the forest, including trees, including wildlife, including water and soil, aren't monetized. Because they are public assets, the access to any of those things can change depending on

Natural Resources committee  The members that I represent do. They also manage 15 million hectares of public land, so a lot of those people have the same kinds of issues. They're dealing with managing the property they own, and they manage it in conjunction with provincial crown land as well. So there are ch

Natural Resources committee  Yes, it is.

Natural Resources committee  I guess, first of all, we don't like the term “raw logs”. There have been things done to that tree in order to change it from a tree to a log, so it's not really a raw log. There's a log and there's a tree. Our members would prefer to get the highest value they could for that lo

Natural Resources committee  I'm not an expert in value-added, but I think if there were opportunities, people would be doing that. There's certainly the volume available. There's no question that in British Columbia there's a plentiful volume of logs to manufacture whatever people want to manufacture. I th

Natural Resources committee  Thank you very much for the opportunity to appear before the committee. As you said, I represent the Canadian Association of Forest Owners. About 92% of the forest land in Canada is publicly owned; the other 8% is privately owned and totals about 25 million hectares. A hectare i