That's okay. We can still go forward. I will talk first.
Good afternoon, everyone.
If there are any questions in French, I'll gladly answer them.
I'll do the piece in English and then we can move on from there.
First, what is FPInnovations? FPInnovations is a private, not-for-profit organization. It's an applied research centre, so we don't do fundamental research. We are focusing on research that makes things happen in the sawmill directly, for real.
Our key mission is to help the forest industry be more competitive, and also to help it transform, to evolve. That's critical in the situation we are in now. The pandemic, the situation with COVID, has created a place in which we actually have shaken up the markets a bit and shaken up the industry, so it's all about relaunching and pulling forward more quickly so we can take our place in the bioeconomy.
What is that? What is the bioeconomy? To put it simply, it's creating an economy based on biology. For us, in the forest industry, it's about how we use trees, how we use the forest to create a more active economy.
How do we use a sustainable forest? We harvest trees and then we use them to build more with wood. We use fibre from the forest and put it in a multitude of products. So we can create products that help to capture carbon. We can create new products that actually reduce the load of carbon across the economy and we can create products that are biodegradable or that can be recycled more easily.
All that's a great concept, but if you really get down to it, what is it to have a bioeconomy? In the end, practically speaking, it means that, at a certain point in time, you should be able to look around you and see more things built of wood. You should also see—if you're in Prince George, Saguenay, La Tuque or Thunder Bay—biorefineries, bioproduct plants that transform chips of wood, the residue of wood, into bioproducts, the precursor chemistries that will create the new bioplastic. Concretely, that's what success in a bioeconomy means. It's not just a concept; it's creating those mills.
In Canada, we're actually at a tipping point right now. Other countries have moved more quickly than we have. In Europe you can now see biorefineries, complete plants, being built in the Nordic countries. In Germany and even in Brazil there have been some announcements recently.
In Canada we need to accelerate. We need to go faster. We need to create the context in which we can do that at scale. Scale is important. That's what we need to do.
But what's great about the bioeconomy? What is great about the forest industry? Something fundamental that we all need to remember constantly is that the forest industry does three things for all of us when we grow it. Of course it creates more economic impact for the regions; it creates more economic impact per se, and it also helps climate change. It's actually one of the rare sectors that help three things at the same time: the economy, regional growth and the carbon economy. It does all three at the same time, so anytime we grow, we can do this.
We actually put in the federal pre-budget consultations two asks. We tried to make them as clear and crisp as possible. Those are the missing pieces to accelerate the bioeconomy, to accelerate the scale-up of the bioeconomy
The first recommendation was to provide funding in the order of $10 million per year for five years to demonstrate and accelerate those scale-up elements and to help reduce the risk of scaling up. If you want to construct a large biorefinery tomorrow, it won't take an investment of $10 million; it could take as much as half a billion dollars, so we need to help the industry de-risk that path as quickly as possible so we can help their decision-making process.
We also need to really understand where to go. The bioeconomy needs multiple products that come out of the trees in multiple elements that we can form; we need to enter multiple supply chains. From the same wood, I'll have product that goes into asphalt, product that goes into plastic, and product that goes into insulation in construction. These are all different molecules going into all different markets that need to open at the same time, so reducing risk is important. That's the first recommendation.
The second one is to create a public procurement policy. We can pull on those markets, we can prime them, we can start them, and that starts with a public procurement policy.
Select the right market to enter, create the public policy and de-risk the industry capital investment with the right technical activity. That's what we need to accelerate. Is that possible? Is that real, or am I just talking in big terms? I will give you an example that we lived through this summer when we started a project to create masks to respond to the pandemic. We took the challenge with the help of NRCan to ask if it was possible to create a biodegradable mask tomorrow to produce at large scale.
Taking up the challenge, within three months we did a demonstration that this could be industrialized and put on a tissue machine in the order of weeks now, from the work we've done. Why or how could we do that? We could do that because we had the facility to scale up rapidly. I could pass from my chemistry lab, and in the afternoon I was on the pilot machine and I was running the pilot machine, and if it runs on the pilot machine, I can then go into a mill, and within one week I can produce millions of filtration media per day. That's what we need to do, more of those industrially focused activities in R and D to accelerate the scale up of products.
If we do that, then we can dream of the bioeconomy. We can dream of those plants being created in Prince George, in Quesnel, in Thunder Bay and in La Tuque. We can think about the future for an industry that is not under the stress of a rapidly transforming economy.
With this, Mr. Chair, I complete my presentation.