International Trade committee  Thank you, Chairman Merrifield, ladies and gentlemen. I'm going to be speaking today on the TPP and Canada's offshore wood product exports. Quickly, I just want to tell you about the Canada Wood Group. We are an association of associations and we represent 10 regional wood pro

International Trade committee  That's a good point. When I set out to prepare some remarks, I went on the Internet. I looked at material available from the federal government. I even looked at Wikipedia, things like that. Those were the sources I used. I probably missed useful sources. I even looked at infor

International Trade committee  I did see the scope of the areas the agreement is addressing and these resonated in terms of the issues we face in a number of the target countries. I crafted it on that basis.

International Trade committee  I'm probably not the right person to talk about that, and the reason I say that is I mentioned we're an association of associations. My own expertise is in the solid sawn lumber industry. We do have an organization called BC Wood Specialties Group, which is a member of our group

International Trade committee  What about...I'm sorry?

International Trade committee  Well, certainly tariffs and things like that should be minimized.

International Trade committee  Yes, standards. Those can all be potential barriers to value-added products. There are phytosanitary issues as well.

International Trade committee  Well, you mentioned specific research on potential competitive nations, and so on. Again, I think you'd be better advised to talk to people familiar with the value-added sector.

International Trade committee  We have seen significant job creation. If you look at some of the aspiring nations like China, it was estimated that about 20 mills kept running through the downturn, representing many hundreds of jobs as a result of that 19% of shipments that I talked about that are flowing into

International Trade committee  Yes. I'm not aware of any sort of projections.

International Trade committee  Yes, absolutely. We were hammered in the downturn in 2006-07, where we were over-leveraged in the U.S. market. Fortunately, there had been some work done starting in the late 1990s and early 2000s to buy companies—by groups like Canada Wood—to try to get our specifications and ge

International Trade committee  Yes. I think we would be looking at the opportunities that our negotiators could leverage. But also if we weren't in the game and were being left out in terms of non-tariff barrier agreements and so on, it could badly impact us, I think.

International Trade committee  No. Sorry, I apologize that you don't have my remarks.

International Trade committee  I think what I may have said is that some TPP nations don't look to us at this stage like they have tremendous potential, for different reasons. They may have their own wood product industries, they may not use wood a lot, etc. But I think our sectors, broadly, would see benefit

International Trade committee  What I was trying to get at was that there's a movement in many countries around the world now to use wood in a way that is part of an environmental solution in building and other areas. I think anything we can do to highlight the fact that Canada's wood products come from a sust