Natural Resources Committee on Jan. 30th, 2018

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Good morning, everybody. Thanks for joining us today. Welcome back. I hope everybody had a productive and perhaps relaxing time away from here. I know that some of you were travelling. I've seen some pictures and two people aren't here today, so whatever they did it obviously affected them the same way.

Today we are continuing our study that we were working on in the fall. We have two witnesses.

With us is Bruno Marcoccia, director of research and development in the pulp and paper division of Domtar.

Thank you for coming.

By video, from Alberta Innovates, we have with us Steve Price, the executive director of bio-industrial innovation group.

You will have up to 10 minutes to do a presentation. Following both presentations, I'll open the floor to questions from around the table.

Why don't we start with you, Mr. Marcoccia?

[Dr. Bruno Marcoccia, Director of Research and Development, Pulp and Paper Division, Domtar Inc.]

Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for this opportunity to appear today on behalf of Domtar.

The folks of this committee might know that Domtar is a world-leading provider of fibre-based products including various paper grades, market pulp, and absorbent hygiene products. We have annual sales that exceed $5 billion and approximately 10,000 employees operating in over 50 countries around the world. Domtar is driven by commitments to convert sustainable wood fibre into useful products that people rely on every day. Our company's origins lie very deep in Canada reaching back to the 19th century. Domtar is an acronym for Dominion Tar Company. Today approximately 25% of Domtar's manufacturing facilities are based in Canada, primarily in British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec. We employ over 2,500 people in these three provinces. Our pulp and paper division, which is the group that I represent, operates 13 pulp and paper mills across Canada and the United States. Four of these mills are in Canada, as I mentioned, in British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec.

We have a strong interest in the low-carbon bioeconomy. We understand and agree that building an economy based upon our abundant and renewable forest and agricultural by-products is a very good thing for Canada and for Canadian workers in rural areas. The bioeconomy will lower the country's carbon footprint, provide sustainable products to the global marketplace, and offer leadership in global sustainability. Beyond that, of course, at a company level, we feel that the growth and enabling conditions of the bioeconomy support a positive future for Domtar and support our strong business imperative for renewal.

Allow me to explain.

With over 150 years of history, Domtar knows how to reinvent itself as the markets change, so, as digital technology gradually reduces the demand for communication papers, which is one of our core products, we have begun to redeploy our assets for other fibre-based markets. This process has been ongoing for at least 15 years. I have worked in this context for the last 10 from a technology development point of view, speaking for myself.

At the same time that all of this is happening, we also feel the constant pressure of competitive forces from other forest product jurisdictions, so we're working in a very competitive environment. I'm happy to say that Domtar has been successful in the 10 years that I have been a part of it and, of course, successful all the while.

Some of our products such as communication papers have been operating with long-term secular market declines of between 2% and 3%. This has been happening for, as I mentioned, 10 years here, but for probably 15 years, we have seen the market for uncoated freesheet, for example, which is printing and writing paper that we all use, decline by over 60% from its peak. These macroeconomic factors have resulted in significant industry-wide pulp and paper capacity removal and repurposing. At Domtar we have not been immune to this. We have closed numerous facilities both in Canada and in the United States and have been very busy repurposing other mills for the future.

In spite of these challenges, Domtar sees great opportunity for renewal through innovation. We are committed to developing and maintaining a world-leading role for ourselves in the new global bioeconomy. Our approach in this development is to focus on the creation of biorefineries co-located with our existing pulp and paper mills; in other words, to take advantage of the existing infrastructure and supply chain and leverage that. That supply chain is one of our core assets.

Like an oil refinery, the biorefinery refers to manufacturing systems capable of producing a portfolio of products in support of a variety of market needs that will change with time and that must, therefore, be flexible and adaptable. So, there are not just the fibre and paper products that we currently produce but also a wide array of bioproducts, namely, biomaterials, biofuels, biochemicals, all derived from the renewable sustainable source, Canadian forests.

Our journey is well under way. As I mentioned, I have been working on this specific activity for 10 years. It has been my primary focus.

Across our company, besides my group, Domtar is working on the development, with several missions, of value-added bioproducts, their application, and their markets. One of the challenges in what we do here is that we're simultaneously trying to ride a bike and build it. We're trying to create these markets as we start to produce the products.

Our program is organized along five major product platforms. I won't go into details, but these platforms are essentially all of the components of the wood biomass that we use as the basic feedstock of our supply chain. We believe that these products exhibit market and transformational promise for the future. Our basic approach can be summarized according to four key strategic elements.

First, we understand the critical role of innovation in creating this bioeconomy. At Domtar, the way we approach this is with an open innovation methodology. We actively develop collaborative partnerships that include end-users, technology suppliers, universities, research institutions, government agencies, start-up companies, and government sponsors—all critical parts in advancing our innovation platform.

Second, along with open innovation, we actively engage in the advancements of technology through the operation of pilot and demonstration plants. I'm very proud of the fact that Domtar has been a world leader in this regard as it relates to demonstration of new bioproducts in association with existing pulp and paper industries.

The third element of our approach is that we seek to position ourselves as the enabler of choice. By that we mean that since we are big believers in, and in fact dependent on, open innovation, we want to be very good at open innovation. We want to create an environment where people come to us first with their ideas. The way we do that is first and foremost by being quick to make decisions, and based upon our reputation, we're actually doing projects rather than studying them, and doing them quickly and efficiently. We don't say yes to every proposal that's presented to us, but we will give a very quick and responsive assessment of whether or not we're interested.

The fourth tenet is that we ensure sustainability of third party certification of our feedstock supply. As pulp and paper operations, we primarily utilize residual from other forest product operations, namely sawmills. Whether through our own forest management practices or those of our residual suppliers, we believe that the sustainability of our forests is a fundamental tenet of bio-economy success. For those of you who have the meeting notes, they are printed on Domtar FSC certified uncoated freesheet.

There are several examples that we could discuss. Rather than go into great detail, I'll just mention them. For the most part, these are successful examples of world-leading projects that Domtar has executed. We've had several very high-profile failures as well. Since I'm responsible for those, I try to avoid discussing them. The key point here is that when you're attempting transformative innovation, it is a high-risk proposition with a high degree of uncertainty. A positive way of saying it is that there's a relatively low success rate connected to it. You have to be willing to accept that in going into this.

The examples include, first of all, the NCC commercial demonstration plant at our Windsor, Quebec mill, the first of its kind in the world for the manufacture of nanocrystalline cellulose. This was a joint project and partnership with FPInnovations to form a joint venture called CelluForce, which I understand you'll be hearing from as well. Of course, the facility was built with very strong support from NRCan and from provincial sources.

A second Canadian example is the successful development and commercial deployment of a proprietary, strength-enhancing, specialty pulp fibre developed by Domtar working in collaboration with the University of British Columbia and a community college, CEGEP, in Quebec. The facility is called Innofibre, in Trois-Rivières. This unique and valuable material was first commercially deployed in our Windsor, Quebec mill. It has since been rolled out in our entire manufacturing system, and we're trying to license the technology externally now. This is a really high-impact success story that started in Canada and was demonstrated and deployed in Canada.

We're also working on three additional groundbreaking demonstration projects in our Canadian system, all of which are supported by NRCan and by NSERC in collaboration with three Canadian universities and two federal research laboratories.

These involve the valorization of lignin by compounding it with thermoplastics and making lignin thermoplastic products, the integration of a fast pyrolysis system and gasification technologies integrated with our existing pulp mills for the generation of biofuels and value-added bioproducts, and, finally, the potential use of underutilized woody biomass for the generation and conversion of fermentable sugars.

Perhaps most importantly, here's what we're doing in terms of looking forward. Domtar and my team—this is a bit of a plug on my part—are in the project development stage for a world-leading multi-component, integrated biorefinery park at our flagship Windsor mill. This project would involve numerous first-in-kind innovations leading to several new bioproducts. It would establish a unique, market-adaptive, and flexible biorefinery park. This park would consist of interchangeable, forward-adaptable unit operations that can be reconfigured and used for early commercial scale deployment of new bioproducts. This would be the next part of the innovation chain after pilot demonstration. It would be actual early-stage commercial deployment, which is the big weakness in the innovation chain right now. Our hope is that the biorefinery park would significantly enhance our reputation as an enabler of choice and give Domtar a global competitive advantage in attracting and capitalizing on transformative technology opportunities.

The last area I would like to speak to is the innovation system within Canada. As a forest products company, Domtar has had access to the Canadian innovation system. I'd like to very briefly comment that we enjoy working in Canada. We have 25% of our footprint in Canada, but over 75% of our R and D activities are in Canada. That's because of the existing infrastructure, public policy, and sponsorship programs. Domtar supports, has been supported by, and makes extensive use of both the provincial and federal programs for activities across the innovation spectrum. There are many examples. The ones I'd really like to point out are NRCan, NSERC programs; collaborations with federal laboratories such as NRC and Canmet; and of course the universities. The universities in Canada are generating excellent people of whom we have a desperate need and have started to employ in significant numbers compared to the recent past.

In closing, we at Domtar believe in the low-carbon bioeconomy, and we are actively pursuing the innovation and renewal necessary for Domtar to further its growth. We look forward to continuing to work with all you in this journey.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Price, over to you.

[Steve Price, Executive Director of Bioindustrial Innovation, Alberta Innovates]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, committee members, for the opportunity to share my views and comments this morning with you. Those views reflect my experience as a former federal employee with the Canadian foreign service, and recently, as executive director of bioindustrial development with an organization called Alberta Innovates.

Alberta Innovates is a provincial corporation dedicated to research and innovation. We have an arm that engages in research activity, but for the most part the various components of the organization fund research activities.

Since 2007 when I joined the organization, I've been working with both the agriculture and the forest sectors to identify opportunities for economic development and economic sustainability through new product and process development.

In many ways, we've been fibre agnostic. I know that your focus is the forest industry, but in many parts of Canada the forest industry is not that far removed from the agricultural industry. There is opportunity to combine the fibre stocks, to address the needs of a growing bioindustrial sector in the country. I would encourage a more agnostic approach, an approach that recognizes the value of all fibre, from agriculture and forestry.

Biomass is biomass, to many end-users. I'd even go so far as to suggest that municipal solid waste represents a very significant opportunity that can also be combined in the mix with agricultural and forest fibre. Lord knows here in the province of Alberta we generate enough municipal solid waste. I suspect it is the same all across the country. What we need to do is create programs that cross the boundaries, that allow for integration and allow us to tap into the various sources of feedstock for bioindustrial development.

We probably therefore want to make further investment to address the bigger questions of systems and logistics for effectively dispersing or transporting that biomass to facilities looking to utilize it. We need to support research and development into new products from biomass and processes for biomass conversion.

As was indicated by the previous speaker, where they've made investments in areas of opportunity, we too in Alberta have invested in a number of areas of opportunity, including advance materials with the focus as well on cellulose nanocrystals, lignin and the multiplicity of products that are envisioned from lignin, biofuels, and an increasing opportunity to make a variety of energy products from municipal solid waste.

Recent announcements in the province of Alberta have identified significant financial resources for climate change-related activities, most recently the climate change innovation and technology framework. That funding focuses heavily on GHG reduction, as well as job creation, economic development, and community stability. GHG reduction is probably the most significant target when it comes to those new funds.

This is an oil and gas province. There's a lot of activity focused on the oil and gas sector. No doubt a good portion of the CCITF funding will flow to the oil and gas sector. The existence of the oil and gas sector in this province creates opportunities for the forest sector that perhaps don't exist elsewhere in the country. It's from that perspective that I gain hope that as we move into the future we'll see greater emphasis on the bio sector, on bio opportunities, and on the opportunity to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions through bio means.

This opportunity for us is to use biological materials that would replace petro-based. When it comes to adhesives, perhaps lignin is the replacement, bioplastics from lipids as well. CNC creates the opportunity to move into very different realms than what the forest sector has explored in the past. Medical and electronics are all related to those special properties of CNC.

In this province, traditional forest companies have right of first refusal to the fibre resource. They operate under forest management agreements. That pertains not only to the traditionally merchantable bole of the tree, but also to the residual biomass. Many of those companies have looked at ways of diversifying their revenue streams through biorefining activities, at alternative products for development, and at ways to sustain their viability.

I give credit to the federal government for the bio-pathways project a number of years ago, where people looked at the opportunity to bolt new technologies onto existing mills in the country in a plug-and-play way that would not be too destructive when it comes to the traditional product lines but add new product lines and therefore new revenue.

However from outside Alberta, many non-traditional forest companies have been attracted by the vast amount of biomass that they've been told exists here. It's rumour. It's conjecture. It's a perception. They come to Alberta and they want to know where this biomass is. What it's comprised of? How much of it is there? I'm sad to say that up until a few years ago we couldn't tell them. We knew it. You could go out into the cutovers and you could see residual slash. You could go to mill sites and see piles of sawdust and whatnot, but quantification was very difficult.

We started a project called BRIMS, bio-resource information management system. We developed that through a private sector geotech company. Last week, January 24, we publicly launched BRIMS. It's an online interactive system that will allow any entrepreneur interested in tapping into the biomass resources of this province to point to a site on the map and determine how much biomass is available. You can find it at brims.ca. Try it. It's very easy to use, but it's very powerful.

With that, we're able to address the questions as to where the biomass exists. How available is it? That allows the entrepreneur to forge a partnership with the traditional FMA holder. Many FMA holders are looking for the big answer; they're not looking for the smaller opportunities. A small to medium-sized entrepreneur wanting to capitalized on biomass availability for his production facility is well-advised to form a partnership with an existing FMA holder.

I talked earlier about the fact that this is an oil and gas province. That means there are significant opportunities for existing forest companies to move into the bio-industrial space in a slightly different way in support of the oil and gas sector. In some respects that could mean assisting with land management, assisting with reclamation activities, utilizing biochar produced from mill facilities as a soil amendment, for soil remediation.

In some instances, it even means taking mill waste water and piping that to oil exploration sites as opposed to utilizing surface or groundwater, so it's a revenue opportunity for the mill, but it's a cost saver for the oil and gas company, and they don't have to butt their heads against regulations around groundwater usage.

From my perspective, where do I see the federal government fitting in? Well, I think we have a pretty good array of activities related to bioindustrial development in the province of Alberta, but I'd dearly love to work with cohorts in other provincial jurisdictions. For the last several years I've been trying to work with BIC, Bioindustrial Innovation Centre, out of the London area. It's difficult to do, and my funding source is from the Province of Alberta. Their funding source is from the Province of Ontario, and you're not permitted to spend in the other's jurisdiction.

The federal government can solve that problem. You could serve to harmonize, bring people together in partnerships, and facilitate cross-boundary initiatives.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

I'm going to have to ask you to wrap up, Mr. Price.

[Steve Price]

Okay.

Harmonizing of programs is a very significant opportunity. I think that you can be leading the way on policy development. Yes, we've seen biofuel development in this country, but it's been slow, and I think there are some policy impediments to more rapid development.

There are many opportunities associated with the bioindustry in this country, but I think there is a need for a more concerted, collaborative effort across the country, and I see the federal government being the instrument to permit that.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Harvey, you're up first.

[TJ Harvey, Liberal, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'm going to start with you, Mr. Price.

Just quickly, you touched on the BRIMS initiative that you worked on. I just wonder if you could elaborate a little bit on what the uptake from the leaseholders has been on the adoption of the idea of subletting some of that biomass material to entrepreneurs.

[Steve Price]

BRIMS was developed through a private sector company, a geomatics company. They work with both oil and gas and forest sector companies. They are the repository for much of the data associated with oil and gas and forestry operations in the province.

The data is housed in BRIMS and is accessible through BRIMS at the leisure and pleasure of the FMA holder, of the company. They have given blessing to public access. They obviously are looking for opportunities to see utilization of that biomass resource.

To what extent have they had open arms to embrace people wanting to come in and utilize it? It depends. If a new entrant in the marketplace comes in and looks at the biomass and says, “Well, it's waste. It has no value. You should be willing to give it to me for free”, the discussion ends pretty quickly. There has to be a recognition that, even though it's not currently being utilized in a production system, there is value, and the more people looking to utilize it, the more value it has.

Forest products companies have, for the most part, welcomed new entrepreneurs coming in and wanting to make use of residual materials.

[TJ Harvey, Liberal, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

The reason I asked the question is that I'm from New Brunswick, and we have a significant amount of biomass residual as well, but the idea of that being repurposed and being used by smaller start-up companies as opposed to the leaseholders themselves is always a good idea. The idea of it has been accepted, but it's been difficult to see the actual adoption of that type of a system going anywhere. It is the same as a community-based forestry program, in general.

I just wanted to touch on that really quickly.

Do you have an additional comment?

[Steve Price]

I just want to make the observation that, in my understanding, in New Brunswick, one of the major operators owns a significant portion of the forest land base. Almost all of the companies operating in the province of Alberta operate on provincial crown land under that forest management agreement, so there are some leverages that could be utilized by the provincial government to entice or incent.

[TJ Harvey, Liberal, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

I appreciate that.

Mr. Marcoccia, I was really interested in one of your comments at the beginning of your speech. It was around the company's focus on adopting and developing new technology at a significant cost to the company itself, recognizing that a lot of times not every idea is going to work out and there are significant risks there.

How do you measure that risk? You're talking about a significant redeployment of capital in an industry.... I'm from the east coast, and Atlantic Canada and New England are no strangers to pulp mill closures, especially in printed paper, which has seen a significant decline, as you mentioned. How do you measure that redevelopment of capital against what the outcome could be? Also, how can the federal government do a better job of ensuring not necessarily that the technology at a research stage can be done but that the industry is able to adopt it to bridge that gap?

[Dr. Bruno Marcoccia]

As a corporation, we are, like many organizations in our industry, inherently conservative. When we approach transformative innovation, we are competing for capital internally within the organization, in an extremely capital-type environment. We're a capital-intensive industry and the reins are held pretty tight on that capital.

It's not easy. We have to take baby steps. We move as quickly as we can, but what is of utmost importance is to fail-safe. This is why the integrated or co-located biorefinery approach gains a lot of traction: you have the wood supply coming through an existing facility. As Dr. Price mentioned, if you do a plug-and-play approach, you de-risk the entire venture, and de-risking is critically important.

In terms of the role the government agencies play, active participation in the process is really important. It isn't just the capital that's at play here; it is also the appetite for risk, and reassurance, if you will. I discussed this with a colleague just this morning. There's a very interesting psychology when it comes to launching a high-risk project; that is, if you have universities, research institutions, and government partners, the corporation is much more likely to approve the expenditure of capital and resources on that project, because there's a bit of an external validation that's critically important.

The capital is really important, but I think the collaboration is even more important because of the validity it gives to the enterprise. It's like a group of people holding hands as they jump off a cliff and hope for the best. There is a bit of that, because there is great uncertainty. I would say that is a key to making these projects actually happen: a lot of upfront evaluation by a very conservative group of people who want to hang on their capital and a collaborative multi-stakeholder approach.

[TJ Harvey, Liberal, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

I know from past experience that a lot of pulp and paper companies look at the time from when the research is finished to full adoption of a new technology and try to have a return on investment on that upgrade of three to three and a half years, because of the steep curve that's going on within the industry. When you're adopting new technologies and you're forging ahead with these new ideas, what kind of time frame do you try to put on it as the cap? What is the fail-safe in terms of time? What's the maximum amount of time you try to commit to a project?

[Dr. Bruno Marcoccia]

As an organization, we will use different metrics for what we consider strategic projects. For example, one critical concern we have is redeployment of our hardwood wood basket assets, because hardwood preferentially goes into printing grade, and that is the grade that is under the most pressure, if you will.

In that regard, if we are looking at something that is a redeployment of a hardwood supply chain, and it's strategic and could be a repurpose that saves the asset and saves up part of the supply chain—which is a big ask and doesn't always happen—we would stretch out to a seven- to eight-year time frame.

Having said that, we are in competition for capital, “we” being innovation projects. We are in competition for capital and for the existing core business, which is generating cash and generating profits. The three- to five-year time frame for a rock-solid energy project, for example—something you could really take to the bank—is about the minimum that you would ask for.

It is a really tight competition, and the argument that has to be made in order to successfully launch an innovation project is that there is a strategic upside to this. You have to suspend your normal metrics.

Again, this is where I believe policy and government support and partnership and multi-stakeholder collaborations really help make the argument that there is a strategic upside here.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thank you.

Mr. Schmale.

[Jamie Schmale, Conservative, Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON]

Thank you gentlemen, for being here and providing us with your testimony.

Dr. Marcoccia, I guess I'll start with you, since you were last speaking.

You were talking just a moment ago about active participation from the federal government. You mentioned a few items where the government can assist with high-risk projects and that type of thing. Can you go into a bit more detail of what exactly you could see as involvement?

[Dr. Bruno Marcoccia]

In terms of government and federal agencies, we'll launch a lot of our projects in our Canadian system, simply because there are existing programs and facilities and infrastructure that are easy to access. Without going into specific programs or policies, one institution that has been there for decades—my entire professional life—has been NSERC, which sponsors basic research at the university and even at the national lab and research institution level.

NSERC programs exist that make it very easy for us to tap into extremely talented young people and their professors, and leverage what I'll just call the research culture, because it's not just universities. That's something we try very hard to take maximum advantage of.

That's an example of a program that is hitting on a lot of cylinders, because one of the things we desperately need is talented young people. As an industry we were shrinking through the last 10 years. We did not take up new talent as quickly as we should have, so we ended up with a bit of a logistics nightmare, wherein we have a whole bunch of people retiring, we have an empty middle, and we're trying to fill the front end of the pipeline. That's why the federal support for basic engineering and postgraduate engineering and science, and the facilitation of industry being able to collaborate with those people in-between or during their studies, through internship programs, are fantastic.

Policy-specific programs that are very useful are programs such as NRCan's IFIT and the new clean growth program, as I understand them. We're trying to actively leverage those, and they specifically go after certain policy objectives. We've found over the years that the best way to leverage that is to see how we align with the policy objectives. For the most part, we do.

For example, we've utilized the IFIT program, which is an NRCan program. The IFIT program recognizes that the critical gap, at least in Canada, was not so much the research and development, which was excellent, but that next stage. How do you take this and go into a demonstration-deployment phase?

Where policy could help is by identifying where the gaps and weaknesses are and encouraging industry and corporations such as ours to collaborate and partner in taking risks in those directions.

[Jamie Schmale, Conservative, Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON]

How much of the risk are you taking right now in terms of seeing those gaps? Obviously you as an industry wouldn't see these gaps coming, as you said, at retirement, and the holes that are being filled. What are you doing to proactively leverage private funds in order to help fix this problem?

[Dr. Bruno Marcoccia]

When you say “how much”, do you mean as a percentage?

[Jamie Schmale, Conservative, Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON]

If you have that. It doesn't have to be exact.

[Dr. Bruno Marcoccia]

Let me put it this way. If there is no collaboration, it would have to be an extremely compelling project for us to go forward on a high-risk project with 100% of our own funding. We have done that when we can make the technical argument that it's worth it. The proprietary fibre I mentioned is an example of that. That was 100% internal because we knew that we were on to something special and we didn't want to share it with anyone, and we could afford to develop it.

In the other IFIT projects I've mentioned, we're typically in the 15% to 25% range of initial project costs. This is worth noting. The projects that have long-term appeal are strategically important in the promise. We will continue to fund long after the original supported project has been written off and completed. We are in the middle of that. Once we get the ball rolling and start to show positive results, we can carry it from there. It isn't so much the money as it is the willingness to get started and accept that.

In that respect, I would say that government support is really critical for starting these projects. Once these projects get rolling, if they have merit, we will mostly continue them on our own.

[Jamie Schmale, Conservative, Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON]

In addition to the other things you mentioned, would you be accessing loans or grants through the federal government as well, or would it be just on the research development partner, and the universities and colleges?

[Dr. Bruno Marcoccia]

We do go after grants. As a corporation we've shied away from the loans simply because we have a pretty strong balance sheet and we haven't really had to. I've discussed this with our finance group at length. They asked if there was any particular reason that we don't want to take the loans. I said we had to be careful about finance covenants and things like that.

Definitely for an established corporation such as Domtar, which has a strong balance sheet, a grant is more attractive than a loan.

[Jamie Schmale, Conservative, Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON]

Yes, as with anything.