In the very short term, I don't think it's unrealistic to say there may be more shutdowns, because the industry is still going through the process of trying to rebalance. On the wood side of things, they're trying to go through the process of balancing production with the level of demand, because, as you say, housing starts in the U.S. are certainly at the lowest they've ever been on record. Here in Canada we've seen a pretty significant drop as well over the last year. So in the short term there's going to be a correction.
For wood products going forward, we do expect housing starts to experience some recovery. We don't expect them to reach the peak level of production we saw in 2005-06, earlier this decade. There will be some recovery going forward once the current recession has gone past.
On the paper side of things, the current situation is more problematic. It's more of a structural decline. The current recession has only aggravated the current decline that this sector has been facing. Newsprint is one of our major products. It's going through a major crisis right now. Newspapers are shutting down around North America and their business model is in jeopardy. Our newsprint producers are subject to that problem. With that said, there are some growth areas. Prior to the current recession we were seeing a demand for our pulp in China because they don't really have a domestic forestry industry there. They produce paper and wood products there, but they don't have the raw materials needed to feed that industry, so they were buying our pulp to produce locally.
There are some growth areas, and that's why I tried to allude to the fact that if we want to see growth in this industry going forward we need to rethink what we're doing with our forests. I think we need to look at new products, new ways of using our resources. That's the only way we're going to see growth because of this structural decline in demand for basic paper products.