Wood First Gets Cash
Prince George, B.C. –The Wood First program has received its annual cash injection of about $2.3 million dollars from the Provincial Government to broaden the use of B.C. wood products in commercial, government and mid-rise buildings.
The dollars will be used by three different programs:
· Wood Works , which is focused on increasing the use of wood in construction
· FP Innovations, the folks who do the research on how to apply wood into construction of larger buildings, and
· BC Wood, which is the industry organization that represents the value added sector.
Minister of Jobs Tourism and Innovation, Pat Bell, says he likens this investment to the Province’s early efforts in China “There were significant investments made in China in the first three or four years when Mike De Jong was Forest Minister and that was necessary to build long term capacity and results in the market. That has paid off, and I often given him credit for having the foresight in making those investments. I think a similar type of thing can happen with this Wood First initiative. It may take seven, eight, ten years to really pay big dividends, but as long as we’re consistent with the programming that we’re doing I think we’ll see very good results.”
Comments
What a waste of public resources. Subsidizing wood is not the way to go. Give your head a shake you incompetent morons.
Just keeping ol Pat employed a little longer. Industry should be funding wood first initiatives not the taxpayer.
Will that $2.3 million bucks be used to buy wood, or just have meetings and yak about it? With a small prepared buffet at the end of every get together?
I recall when one of my friends moved to Paris France in the mid 1980s to represent the Canada Wood Council and a number of industrial interests, such as COFI, in order to promote the use of wood, especially wood in buildings and wood in the fashion that Canada was used to using it.
I am sure it was a nice job. However, whether at home or in foreign counties, it is simply a marketing effort. After these many years, I am not sure whether there is any substantial increase as a percentage of the use of wood in Canadian building methods versus other materials.
I would love to see some objective data on the effectiveness of the marketing approaches.
i
The increase in sales of lumber to China was a direct result of the Russian 25% tax on export of forest products to China a number of years ago, the collapse of the US Housing market, and the cheap lumber available because of the beetle killed timber.
Things are now starting to change. The Russians are considering reducing or eliminating the export tax, so that they can join the WTO. The American housing market is starting to turn. We could see 700,000 housing starts this year and maybe over a million next year. This is good news for local mills, who have already dramatically increased their sales to the US. (This without any help from P Bell)
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