Western Forest Products Inc.

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The conference is ready to begin. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Western Forest Products' first quarter 2022 results conference call. During this conference call, Western's representatives may make forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities laws. These statements can be identified by words like anticipate, plan, estimate, will, and other references to future periods. Although these forward-looking statements reflect management's reasonable beliefs, expectations, and assumptions, they are subject to inherent uncertainties and actual results may differ materially. There are many factors that could cause actual outcomes to be different including those factors described under risks and uncertainties in the company's annual MDNA, which can be accessed on CDAR and is supplemented by the company's quarterly MDNA. Forward-looking statements are based only on information currently available to Western and speak only as of the date on which they are made, except as required by law Western undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements. Accordingly, listeners should exercise caution in relying upon forward-looking statements. I would now like to turn the meeting over to Mr. Don Demings, President and CEO of Western Forest Products. Mr. Demings, please go ahead.

Thank you, Patrick, and good morning, everyone. I'd like to welcome you to Western Forest Products 2022 first quarter conference call. Joining me in the call today is Stephen Williams, our Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer, and Glenn Dontell, our Vice President, Corporate Development. We issued our 2022 first quarter results yesterday. I'll provide you with some introductory comments and then ask Steve to take you through a summary of our financial results. I'll then follow Steve's review with our outlook section before we open the call to your questions. Before we begin, I'd like to recognize our team at Western for their continued dedication to health and safety. Their efforts delivered another quarter with no COVID workplace transmissions or downtime. This results a testament to our strong safety culture and commitment of our people. Financially, I'm pleased to report that our results were a first quarter record for the company. We capitalized on strong markets to overcome ongoing logistics challenges that impacted shipment volumes to generate record first quarter adjusted EBITDA of $65 million. Operationally, we successfully began to rebuild log inventories that were depleted due to difficult harvesting weather in the second half of 2021. We achieved this through a combination of accelerated log harvest and increased open market purchases. Of note, we purchased almost 50% more logs in the first quarter of 2022 as compared to the same period last year. Our continuous drawing results have allowed us to reposition our balance sheet despite our increased investment in logs. We ended the first quarter with $75 million of cash in our balance sheet, and we also have approximately $128 million in duty deposits with the U.S. Treasury. Combined, these provide a significant flexibility to continue with our balanced approach to capital allocation. In support of returning capital to shareholders, we completed our 10% NCIB in January. Through the NCIB, we returned a total of $61 million to shareholders. And we just announced a 25% increase to our quarterly dividend. In addition to our strong financial results, I'm pleased with the progress we have made in advancing relationships with Indigenous nations. In the last quarter, we continued to advance our milestone agreements focused on joint and collaborative planning of forestry activities with Indigenous nations in whose traditional territories we operate. We believe our demonstrated leadership in advancing reconciliation with Indigenous nations is consistent with what the BC government is hoping to accomplish through its policy modernization. I'll now turn it over to Steve to review our key financial results.