Natural Resources committee  Thank you. Hello, everyone. My name is Sam Meyer, and I work in operations for an architectural millwork firm that specializes in the manufacturing of custom case goods and wood products for various commercial, industrial, and institutional industries. We are a family-run busin

Natural Resources committee  Chinese materials are actually crippling our local manufacturers. We can buy just as many domestic materials. The same domestic materials we can buy imported. What they found with the imported materials right now is that the Chinese government was caught subsidizing to a point wh

Natural Resources committee  Yes. If it were created as a level playing field where the domestic materials were more on the same level as the imported materials, then we, the millwork companies, would be forced to buy domestic and we would all be on that level. If domestic were competitively priced with the

Natural Resources committee  It had to do with fire regulations. I didn't think the question applied to me. Sorry. As an industry, I'd say we do the actual wood interiors of the spaces themselves. I'm just trying to relate to how this question is phrased. We just do the interiors of the wood structures.

Natural Resources committee  As the main one, it's a source of materials, and for us it's always the lowest number that wins. On a job, we could be pricing upwards of 10, 15, or 20 different contractors. Each contractor could have five different companies like us, so we could be bidding against 80, 90, or 10

Natural Resources committee  On the labour side, one would be just having the labour pool. Just in our area alone, there isn't the pool to draw from. Whoever is at that level to go to the next level of innovation and has the computer skills or knowledge is being forced to go to university. A friend of mine—

Natural Resources committee  That's very true, yes. Education is a provincial thing, so how the federal government...I don't know. Can you change how the schools come together and give that path? I find in our industry specifically they're more geared toward furniture making—making chairs or tables, or makin

Natural Resources committee  As a whole, this industry is a low-paying industry because there is no certification. There are no requirements to go through as a base. The long and short of it is that the money for labour isn't there. We can't charge for an increased labour.... As I said in my previous example

Natural Resources committee  Our suppliers are usually keen to say there's an earthquake in Chile and use it as an excuse to raise materials. They come up with the most random things to raise materials. What they don't do well right now is forecast long term. In terms of this recent deal, we won't know bec

Natural Resources committee  I don't have the exact figures, but I know that, because we're an industrial power, they hit us higher. It's a three-phase power, basically. It is higher power than the average. I don't know the figure specifically, but we're in one of the higher brackets. Because all of our mach

Natural Resources committee  As I said, hydro is our only source. We've looked into coming up with diesel backup generators, different kinds of generators, but the costs are astronomical. It takes hundreds of thousands to bring in alternate power sources. We can't. There's no money to come up with those. I