At the end of the day, there's a real opportunity here for the forest industry. We're sitting on the cusp of being able to be very transformative.
This $10-billion fund the task force asked for is to do that. Our expectation is that whenever it gets approved—hopefully, it will be in the fall—the money will be used to promote the use and creation of new, innovative-type industries, and that we will end up being able to employ more people and secure those who are in rural communities across Canada. They are at such risk because the forest industry reaches so many of them. It is absolutely paramount for us to recognize this. That's really hard to do in a province like British Columbia, where the electoral population is basically in one corner of the province and doesn't really understand how important this is.
To be honest, right now, I'm sitting in 100 Mile House. I came here to help them talk about what they can do, because they just lost a sawmill here. They have no sawmills left in 100 Mile House. What are these people going to do? They're sitting here with fantastic fibre, but we have so many overlapping rules and regulations stopping them from doing what they know they can do.
Last week, I was in Burns Lake, dealing with wildfire issues.
There is an answer here, but we have to work together. This is not a partisan issue. This is a bipartisan issue. We're really hoping that this report will transition through different election cycles, because this is very important. As I said in Langford, we are truly in the hands of the different provincial and federal governments here.