Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Avrim and Catherine, thank you for joining us again. It's always a pleasure to have you come and update us on the forest industry as your organization sees it. Because you are the major organization in the forest industry in Canada, we appreciate your input.
I want to start out by complimenting you on a couple of things. First, in the deep dark days of the perfect storm, when everyone was asking the government for bailouts and handouts, the forest industry was probably the worst off and never at any time did you come with your hand out looking for funding. As a matter of fact, which so impressed me, you didn't even let the words “depression” or “recession” cross your lips. Instead you coined the phrase—and I think it was you, Avrim—that the forest industry was in a period of transformation. Indeed, you were. You knew a lot more about it than we did at that time when you started with that.
The other thing I want to say is that of all the industries in Canada—and I might be a little biased, considering where my riding is—that have worked with the government to develop new technologies and new ways of becoming more productive, etc., I don't think any industry has demonstrated a more visible success than the forest industry over the last five or six years. Everywhere we look we see leading-edge technology in our pulp mills, our sawmills, and our fibreboard mills. It's working, and when you talk about government investing, I think we've done really well. So congrats on that.
You talked earlier about the western front when you were describing the environmental activists. This is always challenging. I want to talk about the southern front and the constant challenges we've had from the lumber folks south of the border, the coalition of lumber producers. Over the years, despite having a softwood lumber agreement with the U.S., there have been so many attempts to try to confound our exports to the U.S. For the most part we've successfully fought them.
But we have another softwood lumber agreement coming up in the near future. I want to go back to the one we signed just a few years ago. Our friends across from us in Parliament are very quick to condemn that agreement and blame that agreement for the hard time the forest industry went through. We of course don't agree with that.
I wonder if I could have your view of the benefits of that softwood lumber agreement, and also maybe just a bit about what you see we should be looking for in the one that's coming up.
I'll stop there.