Thank you, Mr. Chair.
FPAC has made an official submission, so I will keep my comments brief, but will flag that we do have a more detailed submission at your disposal.
It is my distinct pleasure to be here today on behalf of the Canadian forest industry, an extremely important contributor to Canada's economy and in particular the rural economy. Our industry, I will remind you, is a global export powerhouse. We send product to over 187 nations worldwide. We are also the economic engine of hundreds of communities across the country that are almost entirely dependent on our existence. We employ 200,000 Canadians, and significantly more Canadians benefit indirectly as well.
You all know that the forest industry has faced significant challenges. In response, we have retooled and we have charted an interesting, exciting future direction. Our sense of confidence is supported and underpinned by an amazing and impressive innovation system with a remarkable array of new innovations in new products, new markets, and new processes. We have had the opportunity to describe our vision and our innovation agenda with this committee in the past, but I will remind you that the potential in front of us is great. By the year 2020, our aspirational goal is to employ an additional 60,000 Canadians, add an additional $20 billion to the Canadian economy, and further reduce our environmental footprint by 35%.
The government and all of our partners have been instrumental in supporting our pathway of change. This includes an array of support, from the trade posts to the investment in forest industry transformation program to the federal-provincial-industrial collaboration in a research powerhouse called FPInnovations. I will note that Pierre Lapointe, the CEO of FPInnovations, is here with me today.
Our official submission highlights three important suggestions for your consideration. Today I'll use your time to dive deeper into one of them and just mention the other two very briefly.
Our forest sector has a strong desire to fill our innovation pipeline with more ideas from colleges and universities to really leverage the brain power for this transformational journey that vision 2020 is articulating. To date we have been the direct beneficiary of research capacity in 26 Canadian universities supporting this transformation. It has been the direct result of an interesting sectoral initiative collaboration out of NSERC that was launched in 2008 and is coming to an end in March 2015.
The research outcomes of this initiative have been impressive, and I urge you to look at them in detail. I will just say that at the highest levels, through the efforts of over 120 professors, 515 students and postgrads, and close collaboration with the industry and our innovation partner of FPInnovations, Canada is now the global leader and is extremely competitive in an array of new products such as nanocrystals, bioactive papers, new lightweight biomaterials that feed their way into the supply chain of an incredible array of other sectors, bio-textiles, where we are now in the supply chain of the textile industry of India, for example, and new wood construction applications.
I'm naming just a few here. I will proudly point out that we have a new brochure in innovation with a lot more success stories called “Forest Innovation: Expect Us in the Unexpected”. We'd be happy to distribute that.
To maintain our edge, though, we need to build further research from these research outcomes and get further momentum. Our partners, our colleges, our universities, and we are recommending the establishment of a dedicated fund of $60 million over five years for university and college R and D to fill that innovation pipeline.
I'll close by saying that we have two additional recommendations in our brief. One is to improve our federal-provincial-industrial coordination in promoting our forest practices globally. We do continue to face environmental campaigns despite the fact that we have world-class environmental credentials. I think we could all work together on protecting and supporting Canada's brand.
The final recommendation is to urge the government to convert the SDTC next-generation biofuel fund to a biorefinery fund. This fund has been around for six years. This is not the first time I've requested this of this committee, but I do ask you to look at it again, because another year has passed, another year where it remains unspent. If you convert it, it will be applicable to the forestry sector, the agriculture sector, the biochemical sector, the textile sector, the biofuel sector, etc., to deliver our bioeconomy potential.
Thank you very much.