I was born and raised in…

I was born and raised in Thunder Bay, Ontario. It is a great city to live in and raise a family but in the last two decades the city has suffered. This was largely due to the fact that this was a pulp and paper city and Northwestern Ontario was a pulp and paper region. We used to have 12 pulp and/or paper mills and now we are down to only two in the region. The city of Thunder Bay itself had 4 pulp and paper mills and is now down to only one. That one mill used to employ over 3000 people in this city which also created hundreds of service industry jobs, utility and infrastructure, healthcare, recreational, and so on. That mill today is down to around 300 people. The mill still plays a large part in the community here and is still the lifeblood of hundreds of families in this city.

The baseless allegations that Greenpeace has made against the forestry sector and Resolute Forest Products in particular hurts families, communities, First Nations, and businesses. The simple fact is that Greenpeace has pointed their fingers at a company that has made responsible decisions in terms of forestry management and have made their operations fully sustainable. Greenpeace was shown to not be able to produce documents to support their claims and simply said that their statements were “conjecture” and “opinion” instead of fact as they had so vehemently alluded to before. The future of my community and my family depends on the sustainable future of the forestry sector.

While some people may argue that paper products in general have no place in the future, I beg to differ. There have been several interesting advances in materials science using wood products. The latest advance that I heard about is from the University of Maryland where a team of two engineers developed a process to turn wood into a material that performs on the same level as titanium alloys but is far lighter and cheaper. The two step process produces wood that is 12 times stronger and 10 times harder than untreated wood. Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stronger-than-steel-able-to-…. There are also applications in increasing the strength of cement; the most common man-made material in the world, which will be used to construct a bridge in California this spring. Source: https://phys.org/news/2018-02-microscopic-wood-nanocrystals-concrete-st….

There are several more applications related to nanocellulose materials. Super clear paper that could completely replace plastics, transparent wood for energy efficient buildings, solar water desalination and filtering for safe drinking water, photonic paper for improving solar cell efficiency by 30%, a battery and super capacitor made out of wood, and a battery made from a leaf. As an Electrical Engineer I am particularly interested in improving solar cells, batteries and capacitors as these are components that are produced using particularly toxic processes. Replacing batteries with natural wood based materials is such a huge leap in energy storage technology that the impacts are too large to measure. Source: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-02/uom-swc020718.php

I support the extension of the section 55 ESA regulation!

I support the establishment of a multi-stakeholder panel to provide critical oversight and input on a workable solution for the Endangered Species Act! The extension should be five years instead of two!

The extension should be implemented as soon as possible!

An inadequate solution to the Endangered Species Act will result in catastrophic wood supply reductions, mill closures, and severe socio-economic impacts!

Please consider what I have written here and don’t kill my already struggling city and region of Ontario!

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