Thank you. Allow me to start by congratulating Nobina on her panel's excellent report. The forest industry is very supportive of its work.
The Canadian forest industry continues to employ 600,000 people, and we are the major support for 200 communities across this country, communities that fall into social despair when the mill closes. So I want to talk mostly about how to sustain jobs across Canada and especially in rural Canada.
The question of how much spending government should do and how much controlling of the deficit it should do obviously is a fine balance. We all know that with a looming recession, some stimulus is needed and the government still has to do some spending.
What I want to talk about most is whether we can do that spending so as to maximize its impact on people keeping their jobs. And the best way of maximizing the impact of the government's spending is to look at measures that increase our long-term capacity to compete. There's no point in government stimulating in a way that supports the status quo. What we need is government intervention that accelerates transformation of industry so that we can keep jobs in the long term, and so that when the government stimulus is removed, the industries will be stronger rather than weaker as a result of the government stimulus.
The Canadian forest industry has four ways in which it is rapidly transforming: we are increasing productivity--we are already 20% better than the Canadian manufacturing average; we're exporting more to China and emerging markets; we are doing rapid innovation in both our business model and our technology; and we are improving our environmental performance.
The government has supported all those changes, and our key message today is this: don't allow the programs that support those changes to sunset. The programs under the forest industry long-term competitiveness strategy—such as the support for the innovation institute, for the Canada wood program, for exports, for advertising our environmental credentials—are the key to industry transformation, and they should not be sunsetted. If the government has to cut, it should be somewhere else, not in the programs that have the transformative effect, not in the programs that actually increase our capacity to compete.
I believe the total cost of those programs per year is $64 million, and if it's necessary to find the savings elsewhere, we strongly suggest doing that, but we do not want to see that cut. We also want to see those programs modified to better support the implementation of the Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement, which has added a huge amount of environmental status to both the country and the industry in international markets.
The IFIT program, which allows us to commercialize R and D—that is, instead of letting the new ideas languish in the lab, bring them up to scale—has been funded at a level of $100 million in the past. It's a huge success. I think at last count we had 52 more applications than there is money. That fund should be replenished at $100 million a year for the next three years, because it is probably the thing with the most leverage of everything the government can do. It's taking good ideas that transform the industry out of the laboratory, out of the university, and putting them into the field where they actually create jobs.
We are great supporters of SDTC and the work it does, and we want to see the government continue to support it. There is one fund in there, the renewable energy fund—I think it's called next generation renewable—whose terms and conditions we'd like to see change from bioenergy and biochemicals to either one or the other.
Finally, going beyond the forest industry, the accelerated capital depreciation remains a great way of encouraging investment and increasing productivity, and we support all the other industries who are coming here to say we need investment in skilled labour, in trades, and a review of immigration procedures so that we can get the people we need here to keep the jobs here.
Thank you.