Good morning. Thank you for the opportunity to appear before the committee.
I've shared my comments with you ahead of time, so I can be briefer. I'm drawing on both my research experience as well as my experience from being involved in various rounds of the dispute, going back a good 15 years or more.
There are three points I'd like to emphasize to the committee as you investigate this issue.
The first is to understand that in some ways these different notions of how we manage our forests really influence the way these discussions take place. The Americans view with skepticism our public ownership of timber and the policies around how we manage that, and that's just an unfortunate by-product of this dispute. Anything we do in terms of policies to try to improve or strengthen either our forest sector or the competitiveness of our industry tends to be viewed with a high degree of skepticism.
That's something to keep in mind. Because of the risks associated with this kind of dispute—and my feeling is that we'll find ourselves being approached by the Americans with something around how we manage this trade agreement—it's important that we keep the flexibility we have to develop policies that are in our best interests, not necessarily just to meet American objectives, which mainly tend to focus on limiting access to the U.S. market.
Along those lines, I think there are two voices that are often neglected in these kinds of discussions. One of those is the smaller manufacturers, the secondary industries and others that are highly reliant on the U.S. market. Even though individually they are quite small, they still make up a considerable proportion of the value, the employment, and the trade that we have with the U.S., and if anything they are even more dependent on the U.S. market than some of our producers here in B.C., so I'd want to make sure that they have an opportunity to offer their input in any kind of agreement or discussions that are presented for negotiation.
The other one is that here in B.C., and I would imagine elsewhere in Canada, we're seeing some evolution in how we think about forest management, with new partnership arrangements, often with aboriginal communities and others. Again I think we want to allow ourselves the opportunity to be able to do that without having to worry about being constrained by such an agreement.
I'll end there and perhaps just pick up on something that Cam said. For much of the industry, it is a tightly-woven web of interconnections, and if we hope to gain the maximum value from our forest resources and have a healthy forest, we'll need a healthy forest industry. Therefore, taking into account these different perspectives, as you're doing, is essential to making sure that we can strike a good agreement.
With that, I'd be happy to take any questions.