It's 820,000 jobs, it's the largest employer of aboriginal Canadians, and it's the sole employer of 300 towns. I don't think any member of Parliament needs to be convinced this is urgent or that giving this up through inaction would simply be irresponsible. I don't think there's anyone in this room who doesn't understand how urgent it is.
I think our problem is not a lack of motivation; it's a lack of sense of direction. What do we do? What's the right answer? We tend to come up with small solutions; we'll guarantee a loan here, do a bit of training there. We need all of those things, and we need urgent action on refundability of SR and ED credits and the extension of the CCA . But we also need a much more ambitious vision. It has to be market driven. We should have a government-industry program that is much more ambitious, to penetrate new markets and to secure deeper penetration of existing markets. We are under-investing in research. Our competitors' governments put much more money into forest industry research than we do. There is the possibility of moving to new products, to smart papers, to bio-refineries. We have the natural resources, but we are under-investing in research and in the research adoption programs for this to happen.
So there's marketing, research, and there's industry structure. We have strangely thought that if we keep the industry structure small, having a little mill in each town, that somehow or other this will keep us strong. Little mills can be brilliant and profitable, and big mills can be brilliant and profitable, but when government dictates industry structure, it almost inevitably gets it wrong. Let the marketplace decide the structure of industry.
Transportation. We have rail transportation in which 90% of our mills are captive to one railway. They do what every good monopoly does: they exploit and give poor service to their clients. We can't afford this as a nation that is far-flung.
There's lots that can be done. I don't think there's any lack of motivation. I just don't think we've organized ourselves to look at it from the marketplace through to the infrastructure, the industry structure, and the human resources.
Again, I'm going to point to the vision document we've given to all of you, and also a competitiveness task force report in which we do this. Industry is willing to do its part. You guys can't solve this; industry has to solve it together with our workers. But we can't do it ourselves; we need the changes in business climate.
Again, I think the only way we're going to get the urgency, madame, you talk of is to put together a task force of parliamentarians, leaving partisan positioning aside, and say, if we want to keep these jobs in Canada in an area in which we have a natural competitive advantage, what do we have to do? And then we should get it done.