I'll speak to that and, Kate, if there's anything I miss, feel free to come in afterwards.
We offered advice to the government on how to launch a successful tree planting program, and I'd be happy to share that through the chair to the full committee.
Our industry plants five to six hundred million seedlings every year across the country. I'm really proud that this year the plant went ahead without any major outbreaks—and that came with a lot of collaboration with governments, northern mayors and councils and northern indigenous communities. We did such a good job that the tree planters were worried about the northern locals in terms of contracting COVID. A lot of great work was done. We do have a lot of experience in this area.
In the advice we shared with the government, there were a couple of things. Number one, seedlings don't just pop up. We need time to build capacity, and it can take up to four years to build that capacity. Given that we plant on average a thousand trees every minute, once the capacity is there, we have the ability to do that planting. It's the capacity crunch we worry about for a couple of reasons. Number one, you want to get value for taxpayer dollars here, because, if you have a surge and there's not enough capacity, the prices are going to go through the roof for both the federal government and our companies, and that's not great.
The other thing we'd want to do is to make sure that experienced people are doing the planting, those who are planting for resiliency, so that those trees don't die. I really hope that as the government goes forward, we're going to tap into existing resources—provincial governments, indigenous communities and nurseries—that have a lot of expertise. It's really not a time to find some newbie to start doing this stuff, because it is very complicated work, and you want to be planting the right trees in the right places. The nursery capacity, I would say, is a really big challenge.
I'd like to see that you also don't want to have this two-billion surge and then just stop planting. If you want to build that business capacity in that nursery sector, I would love to see a longer-term commitment to continue to do this so that the investments would be worthwhile.
The other thing I'll add, in terms of the planting itself, is that we see a huge opportunity for more urban forests, in more urban communities and rural communities, in addition to planting in areas of our working forest that have been hit by pests and fire. As Jean-François said, we replace what we harvest in Canada. We actually replace more than we harvest, but if you have land that's attacked by pests or is burned by fire, there's a bit of a gap there, because on provincial lands it's incumbent on the provincial governments to replace those trees. If they don't have the budget to do that, you're relying on natural regeneration, and in some scorched areas that natural regeneration might not be happening.
This is also why we asked the federal government to please work with the provinces who know this stuff. Please work with indigenous communities who know this stuff as you determine where in the working forests we can also plant trees beyond those in just the urban and rural parts.
I've taken up some time, but I hope that helps to answer your question.