Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you to all of you for being here and to those speaking with us from British Columbia.
Mr. Irving, thank you. In my constituency you have a plant, and it's very engaged in community-based work with non-profits on retraining, skills upgrading, and so on. I thank you for that. It isn't often recognized that you have made a very close relationship between community building and trying to use the local resource--human--and bringing that together with the natural resource, and bringing high-value-added activity.
This morning I was at a meeting, Mr. Chairman, and the chairman of that meeting was talking about what happened during the war when we transformed our whole production capability to a war footing, and people were mobilized to meet that need.
The description of climate change as being tantamount to an international and global catastrophe as we speak has been refuted on the one hand but more often is recognized as a real threat. All of you have talked about how your particular interests vector into being part of a strategic response to climate change. In particular is the opportunity lost for restructuring the forestry industry and the opportunity now to see Finland, to see what's happening in Europe, to recognize the trends in China and India, and to see what we've been doing wrong.
We talked about a national round table. Would you take it that we could, in that round table, focus strategically on what the forestry industry can contribute to climate change, in terms of biomass, biofibre, and all of the technology and the commercialization, and the challenge that we have to do this quickly? Could you see that national round table at least taking that kind of a theme from forestry, bringing people in and highlighting it so that government then could have a list of recommendations that would be a strategic response, and using the round table to do that, from each of your perspectives? The university perspective would be on research and development from capital formulation, so that we have a total response.