Thank you, Mr. Garneau.
Yes, joint market efforts build the industry's road for the future, in British Columbia as well as across Canada. It should not be lost on us that our high dependence on the U.S. market left the forest industry very vulnerable. As Mr. Arsenault said, we were the bellwethers of this global recession. Four years ago, we saw the peak of U.S. housing starts and the decline. As that decline in housing starts occurred, you saw problems that manifested themselves in Canada.
Our best opportunity is to diversify markets and diversify product mix. So the programs that get funded by government on market access and market development are crucial, as are programs that fund research and development, in getting new products from the labs to the marketplace. These are long-running programs. One of the problems with the programs is that because they are so crucial for diversification and for capitalizing on future opportunities, we need long-term funding over them. The current renewal of these programs was for two years. I understand the budget constraints that governments face, but we need to go beyond two-year funding to secure things.
We have at the Canada Wood Group some 50 to 70 people located in offshore markets. We need to be able to maintain that infrastructure in a stable manner so that we can continue to build on the relationships we have with governments and customers in those marketplaces.