Thank you, Rémi. And I’d like to also welcome everyone to this important event that brings us all here today.

The plant, which you’ll be able to tour in a few minutes, has an area of 153,000 square feet and is equipped with the latest technology for black and white book printing. Not only has our investment preserved existing jobs, it has added 70 others, for a grand total of 325 employees, which makes Transcontinental a major economic partner of your region and consolidates our position as Canada’s leading book printer.

We will continue to serve an impressive list of Quebec and Canadian publishers from Louiseville, but more than half the products we print will be for the U.S. market. Combined with the modular reorganization of our plants, which will allow for shorter production times in a one-way workflow, from order taking to delivery, our investment at Louiseville will lower our costs and help us reduce the negative impact of the stronger Canadian dollar on our exports. It will also translate into ever shorter turnaround times for our customers. I’ll return to this shortly.

A project of this scope obviously requires the contribution of many people and organizations. Rémi mentioned the extraordinary support we have had from local political and business representatives. This support has been unflagging since last June, and I thank you for it. Once the project was launched, however, it was our people who carried it forward on a daily basis while preparing the best possible transition between the old plant and the new one. Allow me to salute the members of this fine team:

• François Olivier, president of Transcontinental’s Printing Products and Services sector, which is responsible for printing, books, newspapers and commercial products, as well as our Mexican activities.
• Jacques Grégoire, senior vice president of the Book Group, who spent a lot of time on-site supervising the project. In fact, Jacques, I’ve been told that Louiseville is thinking of making you an honorary citizen!
• Gaston Marcoux, who was responsible for the worksite and who monitored progress on a daily basis. Naturally, Gaston knows every inch of the plant.
• Richard Lafrenière, general manager of Transcontinental Gagné, who, with his people, made sure that production continued through a transitional period that posed all kinds of challenges.
• Gaston Alarie, the plant controller, a discreet but absolutely indispensable person, especially for a major project like this one.
• Michel Handfield, the union representative, and the entire team at Louiseville At Transcontinental, it really is the people who make the difference!

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Behind a project like the building of a new plant lies a corporate strategy. I’d like to say a few words about ours.

First, we specialize our plants and aim to be the best in each of our niches. For example, in book printing, we have focused on short and medium runs. The primary strength of our network, the largest in Canada, is that we can offer our customers a complete set of products and services. We can do market tests of 500 copies to runs of 100,000; there are also reprints, which we can produce in the shortest turnaround times in the industry. We also produce books in black and white or colour in all sizes, with hard or soft covers, and all types of bindings.

Over the past few years we have successfully developed short-run digital printing. We print about a hundred books a month that have an average run of 800 copies. Time to delivery is barely 10 days.

There has been a lot of talk lately about the threat that emerging countries, such as China, pose to Canadian corporations, as well as the impact of the stronger Canadian dollar. Without denying this dual challenge, I’d like to point out that at Transcontinental we have significant advantages when it comes to competing: our expert, dedicated and motivated workforce, our corporate culture based on being close to our customers, our major programs to invest in new technology and the reorganization of our plants into a modular structure where everything can be done in less time.

Our investment at Louiseville is a concrete illustration of this approach. Not only will we cut our costs, but we also plan to reduce our cycle times by half, which will give our customers greater flexibility in the market. They will be able to do a small run to test the market and, if the response is positive, to place a larger order that we can deliver very quickly.

So Transcontinental is in an excellent position to deal with global competition. And we will do it from Louiseville for many years to come!

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In closing, I’d like to reiterate that Transcontinental is taking steps to keep growing in a targeted and disciplined manner. In 2006, we’ll be investing $130 million in the latest technologies, and even more when you add in our media activities. We have the financial capacity, the strategy and the people to do so.

Thank you for your attention.