Natural Resources committee  Not offhand.

Natural Resources committee  I was just going to comment on an earlier question of yours, Mr. Boshcoff, related to Alberta. If memory serves, and I'm working from memory, Alberta since 2003 has seen the loss of about 3,000 direct jobs at facilities in that province, which would be about 10% of the Canadian total, roughly proportional to its share of the industry.

Industry committee  As we have mentioned on a number of occasions, the most important factor is the rise in the industry's productivity, which is ongoing. In fact thanks to that increasing productivity, fewer workers are needed to produce the same quantity of goods.

Industry committee  You are completely right. There is a restructuring going on, and there's no question it causes difficulty for individuals and communities. I would make the point, though, that over the long term--if you look over a 30-year period--employment levels in the industry have been very, very stable, despite steady increases in productivity.

Industry committee  As my colleague mentioned, we invest 500 million dollars per year.

Industry committee  If you compare what we do with what other Canadian sectors do, it's fairly significant. However, there's no doubt we need to do more in the future. We have just made fairly significant changes to our innovation system within the structure of our research institutes. We want to increase our investments each year, despite the fact that the industry is operating in relatively difficult conditions.

Industry committee  There certainly are examples of people using wood biomass pellets and other forms of biomass energy in other uses. In other jurisdictions, in many parts of Europe, for example, where incentives for renewable energy are more generous than is the case in Canada, that's more common than it is here.

Industry committee  Yes, we're talking about deriving energy from wood biomass, and that takes many forms. Certainly part of it would be burning hog fuel for energy purposes. Another really significant source of bioenergy is the kraft pulping process, what's called black liquor, the recovery of a byproduct of the chemical pulping process.