Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I'll quickly go through the table of contents on page 2, just to let everybody know what we're going to be talking about.
I'm going to give a little overview of J.D. Irving, Limited, a backgrounder on our company. Mr. Bettle will talk about what biological sequestration is and why it is important. He'll also speak to forest management, what we're doing and what the impact is, and he will speak to the current situation and potential opportunity. I'll wrap up with policy implications.
Certainly Mr. Moore and Mr. Allen know a lot about our organization, being from New Brunswick, but we weren't sure how much the other committee members would know about us. So we thought it was a good idea to quickly cover what's involved in our organization.
We're a large group of companies based in Saint John, New Brunswick. We have diverse operations, including forest products, shipbuilding, retail, transportation, and construction. We employ approximately 10,000 people in several provinces and states. We're known as the tree-growing company, and as a result, as you can tell from that, we're fairly heavily involved in the forest products sector.
Our forest products group is made up of three divisions. I just want to cover these so you understand exactly where we're at.
As indicated on page 4, in our woodlands division, we manage six million acres of property, made up of 3.4 million acres of freehold land and 2.6 million acres of crown land. We are the largest private landowner in Canada.
We have a sawmills division, made up of 15 sawmills and four value-added mills in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, Quebec, and Maine.
We also have a pulp, paper, and tissue division. We operate a kraft pulp mill and a specialty paper mill in Saint John, New Brunswick; a corrugating medium plant in Lake Utopia, New Brunswick; and tissue mills in Saint John and Moncton, New Brunswick, Toronto, Ontario, and Fort Edward, New York.
I'll now hand the presentation over to Mark.