Thanks for the question.
I certainly understand the importance of the forest sector in your riding and for your constituents. Certainly, I'm aware of the Mass Timber Company and the work that they have been doing.
I'm actually quite interested in the kind of work that they are doing. If you look at where Canada sits on the dollars per cubic metre that we extract, we don't actually look that great relative to many of our international peers. There are some structural reasons for that, but we need to think about how we can do better. How do we actually move up the value chain and create more value from the same amount of wood that we're taking out of the forests?
Mass timber is an interesting opportunity in that regard for your province and certainly for other provinces as well. We used IFIT with the Mass Timber Company in a number of different areas. Our funding for forestry sunsets this year, and we're looking for a renewal of funding in the upcoming budget. Of course, we're one of many.
Certainly the focus for us going forward would be exactly on tools like IFIT and other things that are looking at value-added products.