Business View Magazine | January 2021

30 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE JANUARY 2021 Which is great. You’re working directly with field concerns and industry concerns and you’re supported by the associations across Canada. It’s an elegant model that works well. It was an evolution of the governance in the last couple years. And we also have advisors in different areas – architects, engineers, research – FP Innovations is a board member and a very close advisor to us. So we try to stay connected with our partners, as well.” BVM: How are relations with U.S. counterparts in the industry? McKinley: “Outside of our CWC governance, we stay very close, operationally, with the United States. Counter to what you see in the news about softwood lumber disputes, we actually cooperate extremely well and have a great level of harmonization related to species and lumber values and acceptance of each other’s approaches for the quality infrastructure and assurance for lumber. The Canadian Wood Council cooperates on a lot of issues that the American Wood Council (AWC) does, except for lobbying. We don’t have formal government relations in our work. “The two main streams for CWC are the codes and engineering work and the market development work. AWC’s strength is codes and engineering, and working with their government on issues is an important part of what they do, as well. Canada is also an export country, so it’s in our interest to stay very close to AWC and other groups like the APA that have a U.S.-centric approach. Our technical staff is constantly cooperating with them, making sure we don’t have unnecessary obstacles to trade.” BVM: How does CWC promote the mass timber and wood construction industry? McKinley: “In 2020, we targeted and exceeded 275 construction projects throughout the country being influenced, the equivalent of about 140 million board feet. So it’s been a very