International Trade committee  Maybe I'll kick that off. I think what I said before was about the conditions we've seen in the past and indeed when the last deal was done. You have a few conditions in place—I talked about some litigation water under the bridge, some money held up that the U.S. industry has its eye on and then some levers, which are some other things that are not lumber-related.

International Trade committee  There were conversations about that. Given your history, I think you know better than probably most people around the table how difficult this file is and how contentious and political it has been. From a B.C. perspective, the one thing we were absolutely mission-critical on was that we have the dispute resolution mechanism.

International Trade committee  Yes, there's a very good analysis done by the National Association of Home Builders, who worked in partnership with Canada for years. I'll send it to you after the committee is over. It used to be a relatively small sum on a house. It used to be around $5,000 to $8,000, Michel, give or take.

International Trade committee  I'll start and maybe turn it over to Derek. We work very closely with United Steelworkers, which represents a lot of our industry. They've been very vocal about this alongside us. There's the chamber. There are the Canada-U.S. business groups that we've worked with from time to time.

International Trade committee  I think Ms. Gray asked that question as well, what the impacts are. It creates uncertainty. It takes money out of the industry that could be spent on plants and equipment. It's destabilizing. The duty rates move around because of the administrative review process, and so it's very hard to plan.

International Trade committee  We've had strong demand in the U.S. and we see demand being strong going forward. What you're seeing is that U.S. producers are putting more capacity online. They're building more sawmills, but that takes time. As I mentioned in my remarks, there was about a 16-billion board foot gap in 2021.

International Trade committee  Well, certainly when there was all of the action, and the borders were closed to traffic.... That's not helpful. You know what a year we've had. We've had fires. We've had floods. We've had tremendous disruptions in our supply chain. We are an export industry in an export-driven province, so it's critically important that we get our products to market.

International Trade committee  Well, it has for sure. Prices are very high right now, so the industry is doing okay, but we don't have to look back very far. In 2019 there were 144 curtailment announcements in the province of British Columbia alone, because we are a high-cost environment, and that had a massive impact.

International Trade committee  There's a difference between volume and value. The actual volumes that have shipped over the border were up slightly between 2020 and 2021, but it's the value. Of course we've seen prices that in 25 years.... I would say that anybody who's been in the business has never seen prices like we are seeing right now, and that's because we had a massive disruption in 2020.

International Trade committee  That's a really good question. You know, we have tried all kinds of things over the years. I can't remember who raised this, but this has really been a producer issue in the U.S., where the producers have a lot of power. The consumers don't seem to have a lot of power in this discussion, when they actually are the ones who bear the brunt of it.

International Trade committee  Well, for sure, because when you're paying tariffs, those tariffs get priced into the lumber. It's a commodity market. It's a North American market. It is having an inflationary effect. Of course, under the first administrative review, we were paying about 20%. The rates now are a bit lower, but we're already in administrative review number four, so we will have different rates again.

International Trade committee  I'm not really sure about metrics per se. Certainly the U.S. is looking at market share, and they're looking at whether the share of Canadian lumber coming across the border is growing or not. I would say that we've seen demand in the U.S. grow quite substantially over the last few years.

International Trade committee  “Intransigence” is one word for it. I am pleased. I know the government has raised this, and governments before of all stripes worked on this file. I really believe, as some of my other colleagues said, that the team Canada approach is the only way to go forward. Currently, the minister is employing that same kind of approach.

International Trade committee  Can I make just one more point?

International Trade committee  Finally, as we look to the future, we also need to continue with our market and product diversification. B.C. has led the charge in developing overseas markets, and we've done that in partnership with NRCan. I have to say that the expanding market opportunities program is a gold star example of how to work in partnership and deliver results, but that takes time and it takes years to develop product familiarity—