Access issues take their form in regulatory issues, market acceptance issues, in a commercial sense, and then there are trade issues, to give you three main groups.
In the market access issues, we focus a lot on codes and standards: fire codes, lumber properties, strength values, and those kinds of things.
It is an art to take the science and research that we have here in Canada and get it accepted and used in foreign jurisdictions. For instance, we got the Shanghai government to adopt a wood building code. We had to work with them to do research and development that was acceptable to the Chinese and Shanghai governments. We couldn't just say, “Here's our code; use it”. We have the same thing going on in Korea right now, where we have lumber properties and grading systems for our lumber. It's talking about wanting to create its own grading systems. We have to take all of this research that we have here and put it in a form that's useable by a foreign government. At that level, that's one thing.
In commercial acceptance, you have to go to the specifiers—the architects, the engineers, the developers, and the builders—and convince them that wood is a cost-effective, environmentally preferred building system, and then teach them how to use it, if they don't. The Chinese don't build non-residential multi-storey buildings out of wood. They don't know how to do it. We have a Canada Wood College there. We're training carpenters on how to build with wood.
There are a bunch of things that you have to do in a commercial sense to get people to say, “Hey, I want to use wood”.
On the trade side, there are all manner of things that go on. We have phyto issues. For instance, in China, they're worried about pests coming in on our lumber and in our logs. We've had technical issues in India around phyto stuff. The European Union introduces all manner of regulation around construction products, dry grade marketing, and these kinds of issues that are essentially non-tariff trade barriers. Generally what happens is our trade posts alert us that something's coming down the pike. We work very closely with the consulates, embassies, high commissions, DFATD, and NRCan to head those things off at the pass, to make sure jurisdictions aren't introducing regulations that will prohibit the use of our products in those jurisdictions.
Those are the three big buckets of things that we are focusing on in a market acceptance role.