Thank you, Mr. Chair.
At least I'm going to get my time. I'm appreciative of that.
I want to start with Mr. Hubert from the Forest Products Association of Canada.
We've heard quite a bit today about flexibility within regulation and the need for some flexibility. I think there's an example of that in my background, and I'm sure you'd be very familiar with it. It has to do with FSC. I was in the print communications business for many years before I came to Parliament. FSC is a great example of where flexibility.... I know it's not a government regulation, as such, but it was a body that created regulations, regulations that actually made it very hard to adapt.
An example of that was when they initially brought forward FSC certification, the paper that was made at the mill was kept separate at the mill, but the initial regulations forced the shipper of that product to actually ship it on separate vehicles. It had to be separated out into a separate train car. When it got to the warehouse at the paper house, they would actually have to store it in a completely separate warehouse from all the other paper in the warehouse. If I had a truck come into my printing company and I had fifteen skids of paper and five of them were FSC-certified skids and 10 of them were not, they would actually have to send two separate trucks out, because they couldn't contaminate the FSC product. Then when it got to my shop, I actually had to have a separate warehouse area for the FSC-certified papers so that they wouldn't be contaminated. They were all wrapped. They were all skidded. I don't think there were any bugs going back and forth between the papers.
But that was an adaptation that FSC made as we worked with it as printers. It made it very cost-prohibitive. It added a lot to the cost of the product. It made it very hard to sell to corporate Canada and corporate North America that this was a great alternative. It was coming from stewardship practices in the forest that are actually very good, but it added 25% to 40% to the cost of the product.
I wonder if you can comment on whether that adjustment has had a great effect. I know when we made those adjustments, when we talked to FSC and had those conversations and said that this was very prohibitive, that adjustment in regulation actually created a huge uptake in the use of FSC product.
Could you comment on that?