Generally speaking, if you do an analysis of future demand and capacity to compete once global markets return, Canada is actually quite well situated. Our western lumber mills are right now among the most competitive in the world. The number of mills in eastern Canada that are top-quartile competitive is going up all the time. The demand for what we make is going to be increasing year by year, and if you look around the world, the things that are going to be scarce are fibre, energy, and water. Those are the things that no one has the way we do, except for the Russians, and they have their own problems of infrastructure. So we're quite confident we'll be competitive.
If you want to go specifically into bioenergy, our capacity to do cogeneration is equal to anybody's. We are now at 60% energy from waste in our mills. We produce enough energy from waste through cogeneration to replace three nuclear reactors. So we're well on the path. We should go to, on a net basis, 100%. One of the things the government could do now that would increase jobs immediately, increase competitiveness in the long term, and position us in markets would be to help fund the transformation to a green industry, and there are many ways of doing it that would be softwood neutral. Almost every measure would increase our cost competitiveness as well as our environmental credentials. It's not simply bioenergy. It's a whole range of bioproducts, and we're well positioned to do it.
The one thing I would caution against is to jump into the idea that it's better to burn the wood than to manufacture with it. The number of jobs you get out of simple bioenergy projects is one-seventh the number of jobs you get out of manufacturing. The environmental impact of the green energy from burning wood is not as good as the environmental impact of the sequestering of carbon in products. So cogeneration and the use of what would otherwise be waste for energy is positive socially, environmentally, and economically, but thinking that the answer is just to burn it all for energy is, in most circumstances, bad policy.
Obviously, beetle wood, which there's no other use for, or other waste would be part of the answer.
But we do have a future. I certainly agree completely with Mr. Chevrette. As a country we would be profoundly delinquent if we didn't keep sound businesses alive from here to there to enjoy that future.