What did government do that worked and what did industry do that worked?
The first thing industry did that worked was it shut mills. It closed mills, laid people off, and it retrenched. That was painful, but it had to be done in the face of collapsing markets.
The forest companies that are left today are the survivors. They're the ones that have gone to the wall. They're the CEOs who have for years, maybe, not been sure they could make payroll next week or next quarter. There have been a lot of very tough decisions to make.
What we did well as a sector.... I'm speaking about my predecessors, so I'm not taking personal credit for this. What the sector did well was it came together. Industry, government, academia to a certain extent, and provincial governments came together, and they came up with common responses and common solutions.
When industry came to government, it spoke with a single voice. In particular, I would note that FPAC played a very important role in bringing together the forest sector as a common voice, but obviously there are other actors.
The Government of Canada partnered with industry in very conscious ways. I mentioned earlier the creation of FPInnovations. FPInnovations is responsible to a great degree, not entirely but to a great degree, with filling the innovation pipeline with new ideas, new products, new techniques, and new processes. That has been a great success in which the Government of Canada, and industry though, played an important role in creating.
The industry and the government thought of things as an interconnected system and realized that we needed to work together. I spoke to those three big areas, and it was deciding what the big things are that we need to do and then getting about doing them.
What the Government of Canada got right was it supported industry, and it did so in a way that was intelligent. I'd love to tell a story of a master strategic plan where we absolutely knew what we were doing. That would be a little bit untruthful. What I can say is that we had a series of good decisions, a series of very good decisions where each individual decision was the right decision whether or not it fit into a master plan at the time. But decisions were made—