Natural Resources committee  Yes, it is possible. I think what ultimately drives it from our point of view is the profitability of a by-product. Today the most profitable material we can make out of our supply chain is fibre, and fibre conversion into paper. As we move up the supply chain, we can create more

Natural Resources committee  Again, it's an excellent question. I would say that it's a combination of both. It's execution, a willingness to go out there and take the risk to develop new products and new markets and new business sectors. That's a very big component. I'm proud to say that at Domtar we have d

Natural Resources committee  The complexity of the loan, the bookkeeping of it is—

Natural Resources committee  There's nothing specific to the industry, like a specific R and D—

Natural Resources committee  Yes, that would actually be useful, from my perspective, in terms of getting my budget funded. There are R and D tax credits, which we take advantage of, but to my knowledge, there isn't any specific tax credit for forest-related research and development, deployment, and commerci

Natural Resources committee  Yes.

Natural Resources committee  That's an excellent question. It is extremely site-specific and region-specific. Domtar is a corporation that operates in the interior of British Columbia. As I said, we're in Ontario and Quebec, but we also operate down in various regions of the United States, including the Appa

Natural Resources committee  When you say “how much”, do you mean as a percentage?

Natural Resources committee  Let me put it this way. If there is no collaboration, it would have to be an extremely compelling project for us to go forward on a high-risk project with 100% of our own funding. We have done that when we can make the technical argument that it's worth it. The proprietary fibre

Natural Resources committee  We do go after grants. As a corporation we've shied away from the loans simply because we have a pretty strong balance sheet and we haven't really had to. I've discussed this with our finance group at length. They asked if there was any particular reason that we don't want to tak

Natural Resources committee  As an organization, we will use different metrics for what we consider strategic projects. For example, one critical concern we have is redeployment of our hardwood wood basket assets, because hardwood preferentially goes into printing grade, and that is the grade that is under t

Natural Resources committee  In terms of government and federal agencies, we'll launch a lot of our projects in our Canadian system, simply because there are existing programs and facilities and infrastructure that are easy to access. Without going into specific programs or policies, one institution that has

Natural Resources committee  As a corporation, we are, like many organizations in our industry, inherently conservative. When we approach transformative innovation, we are competing for capital internally within the organization, in an extremely capital-type environment. We're a capital-intensive industry an

Natural Resources committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for this opportunity to appear today on behalf of Domtar. The folks of this committee might know that Domtar is a world-leading provider of fibre-based products including various paper grades, market pulp, and absorbent hygiene

Natural Resources committee  I wouldn't call myself an expert in bamboo, but relative to specialty fibres and going up the value chain, there's actually been an explosion of activity in this area globally in the research community. We can start, for example, with nanofibrillated cellulose, crystalline nanoce