Federal Minister of Natural Resources Joe Oliver told the Council of Forest Industries conference Thursday that $30.5 million from this year's federal budget will be spent on researching better ways of working with wood and on selling that wood to world markets.
Oliver reported that the Chinese market has increased 1,000 per cent for Canadian wood sales since 2007, and Canada was now the largest provider of wood to China. In the softwood category - the main forestry product line for B.C. - the province holds a 45 per cent market share in the massive Chinese construction industry. This not only offsets the loss of the United States housing market during the recent economic downturn, but now that the U.S. is rebounding and asking again for B.C. lumber, creates an additional market.
Also, said Oliver, India was keenly interested in Canadian construction wood, but had not yet come online as a market. The potential of all these wood customers could not be wasted, he said, hence the investment in the areas of better wood products and better sales pitches for them.
"I can tell you there is enormous appetite for Canada's wood industry," he said. "Innovation is critical throughout the economy and for the forest industry it is absolutely crucial."
Oliver said it was important to not just push foreign markets to build more and higher and bigger with Canadian wood but to do the same at home. He said government also had a role to play by modernizing the national building code to make better use of structural wood. He called the Prince George Airport's architecture "a local landmark" for its use of giant wood beams, and more like this should be pursued.
Skills training and encouraging workers to go into wood-related, forest-related careers was also a national priority, he said.
He admitted, however, that the very institution touted to champion all these elements - Prince George's Wood Innovation and Design Centre, now under pre-construction at the corner of Fifth Avenue and George Street - had received no federal contributions yet.