Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I want to start off by first thanking the committee for asking me to testify. I think this is my fifth testimony in eight years. I appreciate the opportunity to speak on behalf of our membership.
I'll start by telling you a little bit about the Canadian Institute of Forestry or l'Institut forestier du Canada. It's a national non-profit association of forest practitioners and professionals, but also very much natural resource and integrated land managers, people who are responsible ultimately for making sure that forestry and natural resource management is well done on the land base across Canada.
We have about 2,700 members—maybe closer to 2,800 members—in all provinces and territories. We're organized in 19 sections. We've been around for about 106 years.
The principal mandate of the institute is continuing education and professional development for our members, making sure that we keep forest professionals or practitioners competent and up to date on the latest science and research that comes out across Canada from many sources and from around the world. We're very much into knowledge exchange and extension work. We are constantly, across our 19 sections, holding various events—conferences, workshops, seminars, field tours, courses—all intended to help our members stay competent and be on top of things forestry-related and natural resources-related.
We are also responsible and very much cognizant of the need to speak out objectively, constructively, and with balance on forestry and natural resources management issues and challenges. That sets us apart, much of the time. It seems that every month or every few weeks we will speak out through a media release, an editorial, or an appropriate letter to government, industry, or academia that puts us in a position to comment positively and constructively on even the most difficult forestry-related issues and try to come up with and offer solutions to these issues and challenges.
It's not always easy, with a membership of 2,700 or 2,800, but somehow we manage to do it, and collectively we have been the voice of forest practitioners for many decades.
That, in essence, is the institute. We're growing and expanding our membership; we've developed programs that allow us to communicate well the outputs and results of good science and research through publications, through webinars and e-lectures, and through all sorts of national initiatives.
What interested me about testifying to this committee is that so much of what we do and so much of what we offer to our members and to our partners and affiliates as well is based on or has a foundation in having access to good quality data in every respect, whether it comes from university science and research or from government sources or from what in essence companies or industry collect by way of data. Very often it is cooperatives that collect data and store it, maintain it, and distribute it. I see more and more of that across Canada, and I think it's a very good model.
I just learned about a data cooperative in Alberta that looks at growth in yield—measurements in the forest to determine how well and how fast trees are growing. Everyone was doing their own thing until recently.
The groups there got together—the companies, the Government of Alberta, other interested parties—and were able in essence to pool their resources, their time, their effort to make something that was rather disparate and not all that cooperative work really well. The result saves money and time, and you have better data not only to manage the forest for timber and fibre, but also to manage the ecosystems and the ecology and maintain the social licence to do all those things—the biodiversity, the wildlife habitat.
I'm very keen on that sort of model and open sharing of data. I could give lots of examples from across the country and from other countries as well for which I've become familiar with how they handle these sorts of things and what they do.
I know that the mandate of this committee goes beyond natural resource and forestry types of data, but that sort of information and the groundwork that is there is the basis of much of the prosperity of this country in terms of making good business decisions—everything from where to place or build a mill or add a new line in a mill to the way we manage the forest for the sake of the water, the wildlife, the habitat, the biodiversity—all those sorts of things. It's essential to good forest management and to modern interdisciplinary forestry, which is far more than just extraction now.
It has evolved in the last few decades—in the last century, as a matter of fact—to be something that allows us, as the saying goes, to have our cake and eat it too. With good forestry, we can have economic prosperity, keep ecological processes maintained and sometimes enhanced, and have social stability. All is based on good data and the information you can derive from that data.
Our institute is very much involved in that sort of endeavour. Our members individually in their jobs are involved in it. We as an organization promote as much as possible and where possible the open sharing of data. We like the idea of portals.
There are always proprietary issues. Scientists and researchers who want to publish based on data they've collected might want to keep it under wraps for a while until they get to the point that they publish it, and they need some security. Certainly privacy issues and that sort of thing come into play, and often it's an issue that depends on who has paid for it or who has been involved in its development and production. But in general, as much as possible we like to see natural resources and forestry data openly shared. It's for the betterment of forest management.
I don't really have much else to say in my opening statement, but that sums up what we're about, what we do, and what we believe.