Thank you, Mr. Chair and committee members.
My presentation will be in English, but first let me say a few words in French.
Thank you for this opportunity to share our views as part of your comparative study. I am proud to be here with my partners in the forest industry. It's a real pleasure.
Thanks a lot, committee members, for letting us in your room today to talk about forestry and where we are. It's great to be with the leading voices in forestry: NAFA, COFI, FPAC, all of the players around us—and don't forget QFIC, of course. We all share this passion for the forest industry, and we all share this vision that the forest industry can have a bigger role to play in the carbon equation going forward.
The world is changing fast, folks. Global warming and the geopolitics of energy and technology will change drastically the landscape of natural resources going forward. We must prepare now. The industry needs to transform to be ready for that world. We need to be in a place where every molecule from every tree needs to be put to good use towards keeping the carbon in the economy as long as it can.
Innovation efforts will be critical to achieve this goal.
According to the 2021 global innovation index, Canada actually excelled in research—patents, papers, all those metrics.
There is one place where we fell short: transferring it to a commercial product. This is where we're lagging versus the rest of the world. This is where we need to put the effort. That's the critical gap that needs fixing, crossing what we call the technology valley of death. This is where I want to play. This is where FPInnovations is playing.
We're focused on the impact in mills, demonstration at pilot scale and results in the marketplace.
Our R and D laboratories now employ about 400 people across Canada. We have labs in Quebec City, Montreal and Vancouver. We actually have programs in every province and territory today. Some are smaller and some are bigger, but we're a bit everywhere.
We have a unique model. We are right between government and industry, right in the happy place. We are trying to please both at the same time, which is interesting, believe me.
Our ambition is basically to get the maximum value we can out of wood. There are two fundamental things we need to do.
Number one is to expand the wood usage. We all talk about it. Make sure wood has its place in construction everywhere. Number two is that all the residues from the industry of traditional wood need to be put to their best use to keep carbon in the loop as much as we can.
The challenges are enormous. We have a big role as the forest industry. There is the reduction of GHG, yes, but there is also substitution. Substitute all products. Sequester carbon into wood construction and other products. That's where we can play a role. Let me give you a couple of examples.
Today we have several demonstrations across Canada where we are paving roads with asphalt that has lignin in it. That's a by-product of the pulp and paper mills—10% substitution. Today we have a mask that we created based on the challenge we got. It's fully recyclable, compostable, based on natural fibre. In a few months that product will be on the shelves.
There is truck platooning. We talked before this session about the challenge of truckers up north and everywhere. We can do a train of trucks, where only one driver is at the front. That helps, basically, to reduce this challenge and will affect 300 communities across Canada.
In collaboration with the Canadian Wood Council, we're working a lot with standards, regulations and guides to help the construction industry to use more wood at every location.
Moving forward now, we're looking, with the Canadian Forest Service at Natural Resources Canada, to create the next generation of programs for innovation. There are three main aspects.
The first is common goods—all the regulation work, wildfire research, carbon evaluation in processes and products, everything we can do to give that strong basis.
The second is to create a pipeline of innovation—all those programs, all those ideas we take from academia, from the world of creation of knowledge, and figure out how we transfer them to a commercial product. Reduce risk to get there.
The third one is my cherished one, pre-commercialization. Get those ideas closer towards commercialization, which involves, actually, collaborating with others on industry, yes, chemical industry, yes, every place where we can basically have a new product, use the fibre, the wood product to create new chemicals, to create new bioproducts, to create a new place where we can have a longer carbon life.
Canada's renewable forests are our natural resource. They have the potential to ensure our sustainable future. Innovation is how we transform the industry.
We have to work together across government and industry every day to get the path forward. We can change the world this way.
We have to grab the opportunity. It is a significant challenge to get all the programs in the right place. It needs your leadership and your support to create the path for innovation. I believe we're going to get there.
I thank you all for your support.