Natural Resources committee  Unfortunately, when governments try to direct investment, even when it is very well-meaning and very well thought out, it very rarely works. So we would prefer, and this is a unanimous view from our membership, that no subsidies, no direct grants be given to any companies or to

Natural Resources committee  The export of logs is a very small percentage of what happens in Canada, and it's tied up with the rules of the softwood agreement, so it's pretty hard to deal with in itself. The bottom line comes out pretty simply: we need a better business climate so that people will want to

Natural Resources committee  Those are great questions. Let's start with the dollar. Did we lose opportunities when the dollar was low? The answer is yes, we definitely lost opportunities, but I want to be very clear that the body that was hiding behind the low dollar was government. We didn't become the wo

Natural Resources committee  Those are great questions. There are no level playing fields in the global marketplace. I wish I could say the free market involves fair play, but there aren't any level playing fields. Certainly our competitors offer their forest industries much greater percentage investment in

Natural Resources committee  Industry loves the government paying EI to workers. Of course we won't object. Extended EI does work for both the community and the industry because it allows us to keep our worker base in place for a longer period of time during transformation. Like you, I end up having conver

Natural Resources committee  We're talking about federal programs, and I would point out that there is one program that's working very well. It's the ecoENERGY Initiative. The emphasis was previously placed on wind projects. Now biomass projects are eligible. However, there isn't enough money for those proje

Natural Resources committee  Maybe I'll start, because I'm quite familiar with Mr. Roberts' work. It's a fairly simple thesis: if you want to know where people are going to make money, you've got to ask where scarcity is going to be. Is it going to be in PhDs and engineers? I don't think so, because China a

Natural Resources committee  Partner with the industry, don't partner with companies--but yes.

Natural Resources committee  It's why I was suggesting the use of the tax instrument, because it applies generally to anybody who makes an investment. If you start investing in individual companies, individual mills, you're basically disadvantaging all the others. Then you also end up with the lack of agilit

Natural Resources committee  Exactly.

Natural Resources committee  Yes, and there's also another way--branding Canadian products, expanding the non-residential market for wood products in the United States, expanding the market for our pulp and paper wood products around the world. Branding Canadian products helps the whole industry. We wouldn't

Natural Resources committee  What happens when you cherry-pick is that the most effective MP gets the money to their mill. We don't want it to go to the most competitive MP, we want it to go to the most competitive mill.

Natural Resources committee  Certainly refundability is a huge step in the right direction. I know that some people say it costs lots of money, but it's money that is a credit to our accounts. It's just a question of whether we get it when we're profitable or before we're profitable. It's the same amount. I

Natural Resources committee  It won't be that hard to get me to talk about these things. When it comes to international finance and investment, it's really not as complicated as you might think. There's a bunch of people sitting around the room, and in the middle of the table is a pile of money, the capital

Natural Resources committee  I don't know. Tom, do you know?