Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
As noted I am the CEO of Coast Forest Products—that's my day job—and I am also the president of the Canada Wood Group. By the way, I'm also a director of the Canadian Wood Council.
For committee members, the Canada Wood Group is a pan-Canadian organization that has membership from Coast Forest Products, the Council of Forest Industries, BC Wood, the Western Red Cedar Lumber Association, Ontario Wood Products Export Association, Quebec Wood Export Bureau, the FPAC, and the Maritime Lumber Bureau. We represent firms across the country.
Our primary focus and what I will talk to today is our efforts offshore; that's where we focus. As you heard Mr. Giroux say earlier, they are focused on the domestic and North American markets.
We focus on offshore. We focus on two major areas offshore. One is market access and one is market promotions. Those efforts are entirely dedicated to the topic at hand that you have before you as a committee, which is sector and market diversification.
How Canada Wood Group works is we leverage joint funding from the federal government through NRCan and the Canadian wood export program as well as moneys from the B.C. government and the Alberta government. We match that with money from industry and put together about a $15 million a year program that operates in Asia, most notably Japan, China, Korea, and just recently India, as well as the U.K. and the European Union. We have boots on the ground in all of those jurisdictions. We also deal with market access and market promotions in some 26 other jurisdictions around the world.
As I said, we work through joint funding partnerships. We work with governments, academia, and research institutions like the forest innovation initiative. They help support our activity.
The second half of what we do is we promote those products in building systems in those offshore markets.
Market access is really all about codes and standards, working with architects, specifiers, developers and builders, working on non-tariff trade barriers and phytosanitary issues to ensure that Canadian products and Canadian building systems and technologies can be used and applied in those marketplaces. I would like to tell you a story about how this works.
Recently Mr. Gorman and I had the pleasure of being in Japan to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the B.C. Council of Forest Industries and Canada Wood's presence in Japan. Forty years ago we went there and started a pioneer market. Today it is an $800 million to $900 million marketplace and is one of our most valued markets.
Fifteen years ago we started to pioneer our way through China. We had very little idea of how the supply chain worked. Today, after 15 years of effort spearheaded by Canada Wood and supported by the federal and provincial governments, China has now become our second leading market and represents about $1.5 billion per year in sales.
I just got back from a 10-day, 20-person mission in India. We have just put a person on the ground in India. Our provincial government, through forestry innovation investment, has put some people on the ground in India. As I said, I spent 10 days there and what I will tell you is that India looks to me like China and Japan looked to us 15 and 40 years ago. There is a demand for our wood there; there is a demand for our technology and our know-how there, so we need to get on with the job of pioneering there.
I think it looks very favourable in India and it is probably the next major market diversification opportunity we have offshore.
Our success has been in being able to create the environments, both regulatory and commercially, for the sale of our building materials. That is underpinned by the high-quality building systems and building technologies that we have in Canada and the export of that expertise and technology to those jurisdictions, along with the accompanying forest products that support it.
To Mr. Matters' point, we have a full-court press here domestically to expand wood's use into non-residential and commercial applications. That also holds true in offshore market applications. We are focusing that kind of effort in both Japan and China today to see if we can not only get wood used in reman applications but also increase the amount of wood that's being used in building and leveraging the greenhouse gas and environmental credentials of Canada and Canada's building materials to sell those products.
It is an innovative industry. We have launched cross-laminated timber, or CLT, in Japan. We are building the largest, tallest wooden building in Japan. It is a non-residential elderly care facility, five storeys high, made out of Midply, which is a building system pioneered here in Canada.
I will not be talking today about the suite of emerging products that we see, such as nanocrystalline cellulose, cellulose fibres, biofuels, and those things. They are all things that are in the lab or in a pre-commercial state. The federal government has a role in trying to get them from the laboratory to commercial reality, but that's for another day.
I will end this part by saying the federal government's role has been critical in creating market diversification and the success we've had offshore, through the Canada wood export program that's managed by Natural Resources Canada. We will also be reaching out to Export Development Canada to see if they can assist us in pioneering work in India.
The last thing I will leave you with is market access issues. I will tell you that we have market access issues that run from Australia to China to the Philippines to the European Union. They are around non-tariff trade barriers. They are around phytosanitary issues. We need to ensure that the federal government, through the Canadian Food Inspection Agency on phytosanitary issues and through NRCan and the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development, will help us deal with the non-tariff trade barriers and market access issues. These issues are ongoing. They require diligence and our attention, as well as the federal government's assistance and help. The federal government has been very critical in maintaining market access and will continue to be going into the future.
That concludes my remarks. I look forward to any questions the committee may have.
Thank you very much.