Thank you for that question.
As I said, I have four years in with the forest sector, so I don't have some of the deep history. The way I would describe it is that, to start, most of the Canadian forest is owned by the crown: 93% of the Canadian forest is owned by the crown, almost all of that by provincial governments, and 7% of our land is privately owned, primarily in eastern Canada and the southern tip of Vancouver Island. About 2% is owned by the federal government and I think 2% by first nations.
That ownership is obviously critical to defining the roles of government. The provincial governments are operators. They own and operate and regulate and manage the land. The Canadian Forest Service has no land. We have a couple of research forests that we sort of borrow from DND, which we don't own ourselves. They're fairly small pieces of forest. What we do primarily is what we would call strategic science. It used to be that the provinces did a lot of science as well, but over the years, through cutbacks and so on, the provinces have done less and less. The provinces are primarily invested in silviculture, because much of their regulations and their rules and their activities are around the replanting of the harvested land. What the Government of Canada is doing is the strategic science that basically forms the basis of what we broadly call sustainable forest management in Canada. We're doing ecosystem science, fire science, pest science, and so on.
In addition, there is an annex in your deck which I think suggests that we have something over 600 employees in the Canadian Forest Service. About 400 to 450 of those are broadly involved, I would say, in the science projects. They are either scientists—there are about 150 of those—or all the people supporting them, such as biologists, technicians, and that sort of thing. There are about 150 left for policy and administration and running the programs. My colleague here, Mr. Jones, actually runs most of the programs that we have been talking about today. That's the other thing; the federal government has international trade, responsibility for the economy, and that's where we get involved with our programs, which are primarily aimed at industry and international trade.
On the changing over the years, I think in terms of the federal government our science maybe even increased in importance with the reduction of science elsewhere. It's not that we're occupying a space that we didn't used to, but rather that there are fewer other players in that same space.
On the other hand, the Canadian Forest Service is a lot smaller than it was, say, 20 years ago, when we would have had a lot more people in the field almost doing more of an extension service with provinces. We've certainly cut back from that and we primarily do science.