Honourable chair, members of the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates, I'd like to thank you for the opportunity to speak today. This is an important issue for all of us and we want to make sure that everyone is making informed choices.
I represent the Canadian Wood Council and Wood WORKS! The Canadian Wood Council represents the wood products associations across Canada. It takes care of market access and shares codes and standards. Wood WORKS! is a special project that promotes the use of wood in non-residential construction and provides technical support and education to the design communities across Canada.
First, I'd like to let you know that I'm not here to lobby for or against Bill C-429, but rather to educate the MPs who will have to make a strategic decision on why using wood is good.
For the past 10 years, we in Ontario and my colleagues across Canada have been building a wood culture. For a country that depends so heavily on our forest economy, we do not stand up and take pride in our wood products and resources as you see in very many European countries. We have, however, made great progress with many communities across Canada, with specified wood options and buildings that will leave a lasting legacy for many generations. Hospitals, cultural centres, and community centres I can speak for in Ontario. You all are very familiar with the Olympic venues and many projects in B.C. and others across Canada. These are a few that have demonstrated we can build cost-effective, sustainable buildings using Canadian wood products that will last for generations.
Now more than ever, designers and leaders are seeing that wood has a critical role to play in achieving green building mandates. Wood is the only renewable product; wood outperforms other major building materials with regard to life-cycle assessment, or LCA. This is a scientific process for assessing the impact that building materials have on our environment. LCA assesses the impact of materials from extraction through manufacturing, processing, transportation, use on site, maintenance, disposal, and reuse. In some countries, including France and New Zealand, government policy has been put in place to use more wood in public buildings to help them reach the carbon goals. Using wood is good for mitigating climate change, and helps sequester carbon.
In Canada, B.C. has enacted a Wood First Act and Quebec has established policies for using more wood in public buildings. Ontario is currently studying similar policies. I was just yesterday in Toronto, where we're also working on and moving ahead with changing building codes that will permit the use of wood in more buildings.
Over the past two years, Wood WORKS! and the Canadian Wood Council have tried to get the federal government to use wood in some of their buildings, only to find that current policy restricts its usage. It is discouraging to see this type of prejudice against the wood industry. For example, we were working on a project, a forestry service centre in northern Ontario, in Sault Ste. Marie. They were doing a retrofit and they couldn't even get a wood floor in their entranceway because current policy forbids the use of wood, not only structurally but even for interior finishes.
Other perfect examples that have happened have involved mixed-use projects, such as the new hospitals in Ontario. We've made great strides in health care. A North Bay hospital is about to open, and Credit Valley in Mississauga. This is a perfect example whereby wood is featured in public corridors, exterior canopies. Of course, with large buildings, like many of the federal government buildings, you're going to have a lot of areas that cannot use wood, but there are opportunities to use it in public places.
Whatever you decide going forward, we ask that wood be considered on as equal a playing field as other building materials such as steel and concrete. We are not asking for any exclusion of a product. In fact, the use of mixed materials, which includes wood, is very competitive, innovative, and aesthetically pleasing.
Let's leave a lasting legacy and be proud of Canada's forest sector, an industry that is very much the fabric of Canadian culture, while helping to meet our environmental goals.
Thank you.