Natural Resources committee  Thanks very much, Mr. Simard. Perhaps I should defer to Mr. Doherty on this, because Unifor has more operations than we do. We're actually not in the manufacturing of softwood lumber. We just get impacted because we're specifically in the forest management and logging aspect of it.

Natural Resources committee  Thanks very much for the question, Mr. Cannings. Primarily, the programs in our area are not of the biofuel or the processed bio-type of industry, let's call it. We're mainly focused on pellets in this region. In particular, in our case, we've been seeking funding for what will be the world's first 100,000-tonne torrefied pellet plant, which will be utilizing technology out of Montreal.

Natural Resources committee  No, not much. However, it's a big concern. I don't mean to say that this would utilize all the pulp. We realize that we're talking about a very small amount, in particular in our area, where you're talking probably $18 to $20 worth of transportation costs per cubic metre to get it to the coast to tidewater.

Natural Resources committee  Yes, the IFI has been instrumental for us, as have a number of other programs. Specifically, we've been focusing on what I'm going to call the development of a bioheat industry within the Gitxsan traditional territory and a bit beyond, too. We have the highest concentration of bioheat devices in Canada.

Natural Resources committee  Mr. Weiler, again the answer is not simple. Land use planning is definitely part of what we're doing right now with the new governance model, where they've broken up the entire 33,000 square kilometres into nine watersheds, and the nine watersheds are responsible for their own governance.

Natural Resources committee  That's a great question. The band system and the hereditary system never meld, because you have an elected chief in one area, and then you have the hereditary system. We saw this with the Wet'suwet'en and the Coastal GasLink project, where the duty to consult is to the Crown, which they did halfway, but they didn't consult with the hereditary chief, and that created lots of problems.

Natural Resources committee  I don't believe the answer there is more tenure, because you need to be an expert in the area to really make a forestry operation work. You need to have those partnerships with a West Fraser or a Canfor. I think the most beneficial issue that could ever come to the traditional territories of various first nations is to have a champion like West Fraser to basically employ—as they do in many different areas—and provide the training programs and that stepping stone into forestry for the first nations, so that meaningful relationships are developed with the community, as opposed to just believing that any first nation company can be a forestry company.

Natural Resources committee  Thank you.

Natural Resources committee  Thank you, Mr. Simard. Absolutely. On the coast here, we have several projects with the Gitxsan that are focused on trying to support the local industry in terms of the optimization, because we believe in the rising tide approach to this. When you take a look at pulp specifically, if we can find a better use for pulp than simply burning it up right now because it doesn't make sense to ship it all the way down to a pulp mill somewhere, then we're going to be basically offloading some of the regular costs, so we can afford to provide these sawmills and the reman mills with better uses of the products in terms of a lower-cost supply.

Natural Resources committee  Mr. Doherty, would you like me to take a stab at this one initially? Okay, thank you. I believe products like bioethanol, bio-coal, or bio-anything, whatever you'd like to look at as end products and value-added products out of forestry, are very good ideas. In fact, the biggest barrier to entry on such projects is basically the capex required.

Natural Resources committee  Yes, mainly commodity products, that's correct.

Natural Resources committee  Absolutely, modern forest practices use a feller buncher to harvest trees, as opposed to the traditional chainsaw approach to it. That may reduce the number of people. However, offering these opportunities—and we're about 85% indigenous company; 85% of our employees are indigenous—has allowed them to go back to the bush now.

Natural Resources committee  Certainly. Thank you very much, Mr. Zimmer. In terms of the blocking and how that works for us here, we have a requisite percentage of our allowable annual cut that we can export. This is not typically felt when we're dealing with the West Frasers or CanFors because we're very co-operative with all sawmills in the region.

Natural Resources committee  That's where I started, Great Lakes Paper, as a process engineer. I'm a chemical engineer by profession.

Natural Resources committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'm Rick Connors, president and CEO of Gitxsan Development Corporation. We're a first nations for-profit company out on the west coast, in northwestern B.C. There are four areas that we've identified, and we've been working with these four areas for a great number of years now.