Bill C-24 (Historical)

Softwood Lumber Products Export Charge Act, 2006

An Act to impose a charge on the export of certain softwood lumber products to the United States and a charge on refunds of certain duty deposits paid to the United States, to authorize certain payments, to amend the Export and Import Permits Act and to amend other Acts as a consequence

The purpose of this enactment is to implement some of Canada’s obligations under the Softwood Lumber Agreement between the Government of Canada and the Government of the United States, by imposing a charge on exports of certain softwood lumber products to the United States and on refunds of certain duty deposits paid to the United States and by amending certain Acts, including the Export and Import Permits Act. The charge on exports will take effect on October 12, 2006 and will be payable by exporters of softwood lumber products. The enactment also authorizes certain payments to be made.

Softwood Lumber Products Export Charge Act, 2006

[Tony Martin, NDP, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased again to speak to this very important issue on behalf my constituents and people across Canada who are involved in the resource based economic sector of forestry, and to put some thoughts on the record and challenge the government to rethink this agreement, which does not do all the things it anticipates it will. We are already beginning to see some of the results of this play itself out in the thousands and thousands of jobs that are disappearing. Communities are being affected across the country, particularly my region of northern Ontario.

Before I get to that, I want to share this with the folks who are watching. What we are involved with this afternoon is really a process of closure, or ending debate in the House. The government saw that we, as a party, were very concerned about the impact of the agreement on our constituents. It knew we would to speak to it for as long as it took to get all our thoughts on the record and to challenge the government as effectively as we could. This place is all about that. We are here to ask the government to consider amendments to a bill that might improve it and make it better.

However, the government brought in closure. It forced votes in the House on an amendment we brought forward. It forced votes in the House on an amendment the Liberals brought forward. Now we are at a point where there will be no further amendments or opportunities for us, as elected members of the House, to bring forward suggestions that might make the bill, or agreement, better, if that is possible, or to speak on behalf of our constituents in that way.

We are here in this place on Tuesday afternoon, speaking to a bill which the government wants to ram it through. That has been the government's approach to this from the very beginning. The minister was brought across the floor from the Liberals, I suppose because he had some history and some experience with this, to find a way to put together a deal with the Americans, a deal which ignores all the legal decisions made over a number of months and years in our favour. I guess it has been done to curry favour with the Americans. When the governing party was in opposition, there was a sense that the relationship with that country was not as good as it would like it to have been.

I served for 13 years in the Ontario provincial legislature at Queen's Park. I remember this very same closure procedure being used over and over again. From 1995 to 2003, the Conservative government introduced motion after motion. This changed the landscape of that province. The current government is beside itself now on how it can recover some of the wonderful programs that had been put in place, over a number of years, by varying political stripes. These programs improved the lot of communities, families and people. They were put in place to protect industry and the economy of various regions and to turn the province into an industrial heartland, which was the envy of the rest of the country. The Conservatives turned it into a province that is now struggling from one day to the next to support education, health care and all those programs that we know are necessary if we are meet the challenge of participating in the new global economy.

I remember Thursday afternoons because I was usually on duty. Some of my colleagues and I would spend a couple of hours in the legislature debating a closure motion. We are not debating a closure motion here, but the process that we are engaged in is in fact a process of closure.

One cannot be anything but disappointed that the members of the Conservative Party are not standing to speak on behalf of their constituents. They know as well as we do the impact this is having on them.

Since a lot of them come from rural and northern Canada, within their constituencies, they must have small communities that are being affected dramatically and negatively by this agreement. They must be affected by the government's unwillingness to support the industry in its legal challenges, challenges that were successful and within a whisker of forcing the issue of making the free trade agreement work. Many of us had some concerns about the free trade agreement when it was first brought in, but we learned to work with it in the interests of our industry and jurisdictions.

The Conservatives have not taken the time in this place to get up and speak to this agreement. They are not taking the time to talk on behalf of their constituents and communities that are being hammered. Even if it does not affect people directly, it sets a precedent. It creates a pattern. It sends a message on how the government will stand up and fight for other interests for a region that is resource based.

I do not have to look any further than what is going in western Canada right now with regard to the Canadian Wheat Board. This is a vehicle that farmers themselves decided to put together, fund and run in order to get the best value for their investments, for the work they put in and for the products they produced. The Wheat Board has been a successful vehicle over a number of years now. Literally thousands of farmers, who are behind the Wheat Board and support it, are aghast that the government is being so aggressive in doing away with it. They are surprised.

I attended a meeting in Saskatoon this summer of some 250 to 300 farmers. It was held across the street from a very secretive closed door meeting, by invitation only, of supporters of the government who saw this as their opportunity to do in a vehicle that they had ideological differences with for quite some time. The farmers I met with said that nobody was speaking for them. Nobody was bringing their voice to this place to challenge the government on doing away with the very vehicle they put in place to protect their interests, investments and products and to be able sell them for highest value in the marketplace.

I am disappointed that Conservatives are not standing up to speak on behalf of the communities involved in forestry. I am disappointed they do not recognize the impact of this on those communities. In my own area of Algoma in northern Ontario, people pick up the newspaper every day to see that another mill has closed down somewhere, whether it is Nairn Centre, Espanola, Dubreuilville, White River. The list goes on and on. That is just northeastern Ontario.

In northwestern Ontario it is even worse. NDP members met with the leaders of northwestern Ontario a couple of weeks ago when we were in Thunder Bay for our caucus retreat. They shared with us the very devastating reality that confronts them every day. The forestry coalition and leaderships of those communities talked about mill closings. They said that when a mill closed, they would lose population, the value of property would go down and nobody wanted to set up shop. There is instability and no confidence any more in those communities. People do not want to invest in a small business because they do not know what the future will be. It is up in the air.

I hear from people in the communities in my area and in northwestern Ontario. I am surprised Conservative members are not speaking on behalf of their regions, communities or people because they have to be experiencing the same thing. It cannot be just in northern Ontario, northeastern Ontario or northwestern Ontario. I know it is happening in other areas. Members of my caucus, who have spoken on behalf of their constituents and communities, have said that this is already having a devastating effect.

I say never mind looking at the past in terms of this, which is bad enough; let us look for a second at the future. If this agreement continues and the Americans continue to have the kind of control they have and we keep shipping product into the United States at a cost that makes it uncompetitive, how will we ever add value to anything we do? How will we have a future?

That is my concern. That is why I am so disappointed this afternoon that we find ourselves in this process of closure on this important agreement and piece of public business.

[Jean Crowder, NDP, Nanaimo—Cowichan, BC]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague's speech was very passionate. I know that he is a strong advocate for people who are suffering the effects of poverty.

In the context of this softwood lumber agreement, could the member for Sault Ste. Marie talk about the fact that what we see with this very bad deal is many companies forced into closure impacting not only on the mill workers but also on the workers who support those industries, all the secondary spin-offs? There are the transportation and fuel industries and then there are the tertiary industries as well, such as the restaurant and service workers.

I know that many of the communities in northern Ontario are suffering from the impacts of the spin-offs from softwood lumber. I wonder if the member could comment specifically on what he sees as the very real impact that goes out to the second and third levels from the direct workers in the forestry sector.

[Tony Martin, NDP, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

Mr. Speaker, that is an excellent question. It is the kind of question that I was hoping the Conservatives would ask or maybe make a speech about. Everybody knows that in resource based communities, for every one job in the primary sector, there are three or four jobs in the support or service sector. The member is absolutely right when she says that when one of those jobs goes, those other jobs go as well. People then are left behind. They have no work or they have to leave town and leave their families behind, who then live in poverty.

We used to have a social safety net in this country. We used to have employment insurance that worked for people. We used to have social welfare that actually worked for people, but the incursion of this very cold right wing wind that has come into Canada and Ontario over the last 10 or 15 years has made it such that the safety net has been rent asunder. It is not there any more.

Only about 15% or 20% of people who have paid into EI all their lives now qualify for EI when it is their turn to collect for a little while when they are in between jobs. EI is not there. As well, in just the last couple of weeks, the government cut literacy programs, which would have been helpful for these workers as they try to shift gears and get into other work.

As for welfare, in 1995 Mike Harris cut welfare by 21.6% for the poorest of our families and our most at risk and marginalized citizens.

Let us put all of that together: this terrible agreement, plus the impact when plants close and people lose their jobs, plus the multiplier effect with the fact that we no longer have the social safety net that all of us worked so hard to put in place. Then we begin to understand the devastation and the poverty that now exist and will continue to exist.

[Joy Smith, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I could not help but listen carefully to the member's speech which, with all due respect, was rather sanctimonious.

I have one question for the member.

Our government has just put in $81 million for literacy programs and I think it is passing strange and somewhat irresponsible to talk about cutting literacy programs. I would ask my colleague this: is $81 million not something to applaud? Are all the different programs that we have put in for literacy across this country not something to rejoice in and applaud?

[Tony Martin, NDP, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the Conservative member for actually participating in this debate this afternoon. I will say to her that any investment in literacy is important and helpful good news, except that the government has cut the legs out from underneath all of the volunteer groups, the not for profit groups, and yes, the groups that deliver literacy across this country. They have been cut off at the knees. The member's government has cut millions and millions--

[Joy Smith, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

Where?

[Tony Martin, NDP, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

In adult literacy.

We had a committee meeting this morning. We brought in the literacy groups that have been impacted by the cuts made in the last two weeks. They spoke of the cuts they are experiencing. They spoke of the impact this will have on their ability to actually deliver literacy programs.

There will be more of them coming in. I invite you to actually come to the meeting, listen to those people and perhaps ask them questions. I invite you to sit in for one of your colleagues and ask them the question that you are asking me about how this is impacting on them.

There have been very real cuts. Those very real cuts are going to be a problem for older workers, particularly those in forestry centred communities across this country who are losing their jobs because of this terrible agreement.

[The Acting Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

I would remind the hon. member for Sault Ste. Marie that we do not refer directly to hon. members. We address our comments through the Chair.

[Jean Crowder, NDP, Nanaimo—Cowichan, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on behalf of the New Democratic Party. We are opposing Bill C-24 vigorously. We feel that this is a bad deal for Canadians and I certainly want to talk about it being a bad deal for people from British Columbia.

I want to start by talking about a couple of things. One is how tirelessly the member for Burnaby—New Westminster has worked on this file. One of the things the member has called for is public hearings in which a committee could go out and hear from people from coast to coast to coast. I think it is a grave failing that this has not happened.

That process would have allowed industry, workers, communities and first nations to talk about the very real impact in their own communities. It would have talked about what it is like to be faced with either already lost jobs or the looming prospect of job loss.

It would have provided the committee with an opportunity to hear from municipal councils concerned about the fact that many of our smaller communities in British Columbia are heavily reliant on the forestry sector for their municipal tax base. It would have allowed the committee members to hear directly from council members and from citizens of those communities about what it feels like in their own communities to be worried about their municipal infrastructure being at risk because of the fact that their tax base is threatened.

I think it is a great loss for committee members and for the House not to get that on the ground experience from community members.

I think the other glaring omission in this piece of legislation, and on the current Conservative government's part, is the fact that there are not adequate funds to address the transition currently happening in the forestry sector. Many forestry workers have already lost their jobs. There is a very real need for education and training funds, for pension bridging, for assistance to older workers who may not be able to find employment, and for some recognition that many workers will also need assistance in relocating to other communities. We need an active transition fund in place.

There used to be a program called industrial adjustment, which worked closely with industry, labour and communities when communities were going through transitions. The federal government cut that very good program a number of years ago. There is now no mechanism to get that kind of community driven process. It is the community driven process that can talk about the problems in the community and identify the very concrete solutions that will make a difference.

The other piece that is missing is the whole issue around loan guarantees to industry. We know industry is suffering right now with the lack of certainty in the softwood lumber field. It was incumbent on the past Liberal government and certainly is on the current Conservative government to look for a loan guarantee program that would help industry over this very difficult period. Because no matter what, whether this agreement goes through or not, by the time industry gets cheques in their hands, some of these industry players will already have closed their doors. Then where will the help be for communities suffering from the transition?

There are a couple of other issues I want to touch on in today's debate. I am sure other members have quoted from the article I will mention, but I have a direct link to my own community about this. It says that the softwood deal will spur more raw log exports. It is an article written by Ben Parfitt from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. He says:

Nearly two-thirds of the 82-agreement is appendices, including one outlining which Canadian products are subject to export taxes.

It is a “dizzying” list, he says. He talks specifically about a glaring omission:

Throughout the appendix, however, one searches in vain for the word “logs”. Yet the on-again, off-again dispute with the US has always been about how provincial governments price publicly owned trees, not whether they somehow underwrote the costs of specific manufacturing processes.

Later on in the article he talks about a “flash forward”. This is really critical for my riding:

Flash forward. Despite the policy changes, the US insists with the current deal on capping our market access. And Canada and BC--to their lasting discredit--have agreed. Once the caps are exceeded, costly export taxes kick in. Except, that is, on logs. Now look at BC's coast. One company--Western Forest Products--directly controls nearly half the logs on public forestlands. It, along with other coastal companies, already has log export approvals from the province.

Now, thanks to the scrapping of provisions linking forest tenures to sawmills, we face the prospect of increased log exports should further coastal sawmills, as is widely anticipated, close. And why wouldn't they? The “reward” for processing US-bound lumber may be a 15 per cent tax when certain export or price thresholds are exceeded. The corresponding tax on logs is zero.

I have raised that issue because in my riding raw log exports have been a major, major problem for a number of years. There has been a valiant and diligent group of people called the Youbou Timberless Society, a group that sprung up as a result of the Youbou mill closing four years ago. A great number of the people from the Youbou mill never did find permanent full time employment again, which has had an incredible effect on the community of Youbou and the surrounding area of the Cowichan Valley.

One of the chief proponents behind the Youbou Timberless Society is a man by the name of Ken James. These people have been working very hard over a number of years to raise the awareness of the impact of raw log exports on our community and other communities on Vancouver Island and in British Columbia. They decided to count the number of trucks that were leaving the area with logs. They did a tally on Highway 18, between Lake Cowichan and Duncan, and tallied 157 logging trucks in 10 hours.

Over four days, from 6:30 a.m. until 4:30 p.m., Youbou Timberless Society members counted slightly less than 1,000 trucks in my riding, 1,000 trucks loaded with logs. Not all of them were leaving the riding, but many of them were leaving the riding with logs to be processed somewhere else.

Where is the responsibility to our community to make sure that the resources from our community are processed closer to home, producing jobs so that people can support their families and pay taxes? As we know, people who make a good dollar actually pay taxes and are the ones who fuel our economy. They are the ones who make sure our hospitals and our schools stay open. They are the ones who make sure our roads get paved. It seems reasonable and fair that we actually look for ways to make sure that we process the resources from our proud province and from our grand country of Canada as close to home as possible.

Later on in that same article, again quoting James, statistics quoted show a corresponding rise in raw log exports from about a half a million cubic metres in the early 1990s to an annual three million cubic metres since the provincial Liberals took power in 2001. That is an outrageous increase in resources leaving our community and our province. That is a direct loss of jobs and of quality of life.

One of the other items that is omitted, really, in this softwood lumber agreement is first nations. On August 10, the First Nations Leadership Council wrote a letter about the Canada-United States softwood lumber agreement, stating:

--the new SLA [softwood lumber agreement] makes only one reference to First Nations in Article XVII anti-circumvention item 2.(f)...payments or other compensation to First Nations for the purposes of addressing or settling claims....

That is it. That is the only mention of first nations in the softwood lumber agreement.

That is an important issue in British Columbia, because of course in British Columbia, as many members of this House are well aware, there are extensive treaty negotiations under way. Some of them have been under way for decades and one can only dream that they would actually get settled in our lifetime.

The fact is that there are these treaty negotiations under way and many of them are not nearly close to being settled. The leadership council had asked, given the new relationships and transformative change accord and a number of other unresolved land questions, that there be some consideration in the softwood lumber agreement, and in discussions leading up to it, of the impact on first nations in British Columbia. Of course that was not done. There seems little opportunity at this point in time to do it.

This is one of the things that public hearings would have helped to address. It would have given first nations leadership an opportunity to appear before the standing committee to talk about the impact on their communities.

I urge this House to reject this flawed agreement. I urge this House to look for creative solutions which would ensure that our communities stay healthy and viable, that we retain the right to process our resources close to home and that we retain the say over our industry.

[John Cannis, Liberal, Scarborough Centre, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I listened very carefully to the member for Nanaimo—Cowichan, and her reference to the member for Burnaby—New Westminster and his passion on this issue. Let me also confirm that fact. I chaired the committee on international trade and he was a member of that committee and I recall how passionate he was about this issue.

The member for Nanaimo--Cowichan said that the previous Liberal government should have provided “loan guarantees to the industry”. The Liberal government of the day brought forward a report, supported by the member for Burnaby--New Westminster, which indicated that it would provide loan guarantees. I just want to inform the House of that and through you, Mr. Speaker, the nation.

The member said we were reeling because we lost the election. We are not reeling because we lost the election. The people will judge very quickly. Let me assure you that people will judge you. Why? They will judge you because your party and your leader, the member for Toronto—Danforth, struck a deal with the BQ and the Conservatives. Who did they let down? Housing, post-secondary education, urban transit, the environment; the NDP reneged and all that money was gone. How are they going to answer to their constituents in the future not just on softwood lumber, but on all the other issues that I just mentioned?

[The Acting Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

I would just remind the hon. member for Scarborough Centre not to address his comments directly to other hon. members. The hon. member for Nanaimo--Cowichan.

[Jean Crowder, NDP, Nanaimo—Cowichan, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to talk about the previous government's track record on softwood lumber. The Liberals had years to implement loan guarantee agreements, and in the dying days of their very fragile government, they suddenly had an epiphany.

Although it was not me specifically who talked about Canadians bringing down the former Liberal government, I want to remind the member that the former prime minister had actually already signalled an election. An election was mere weeks away. Whether it happened in January, February or March, we were going to have an election. Canadians are the ones who determined the fate of the Liberal Party.

It is important that we also remember that we have a responsibility here to make sure that we are talking about forestry workers in this context, not old history.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I want to ask the member for Nanaimo—Cowichan to comment on something I find very ironic about this deal, about the timing of this deal and about other actions of the Conservative government.

We know that almost half of the $1 billion that Canada is giving up to the American protectionists as a result of this deal is going directly to the U.S. Coalition for Fair Lumber Imports. They are the folks who initiated the campaign against the Canadian softwood lumber industry and who have pursued the attack from the very beginning. We are funding their future activities. We are giving them this money so they can pursue their protectionist ways and other ways down the road.

The irony for me is that at the same time the government is providing this money to the very people who attacked our industry, it cancelled the Canadian court challenges program which allowed minority Canadians to take on the government where questions of Canadian charter rights were involved. Here we have a government that is setting up a court challenges program for American industry while at the same time it is getting rid of a very small but important Canadian program to assist minority Canadians with their charter rights.

I wonder if she could comment on the irony of the juxtaposition of those two items.

[Jean Crowder, NDP, Nanaimo—Cowichan, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I do think it is ironic that we are handing money over to the U.S. government and to the lumber industry down there and part of that money will have no accountability provisions attached to it, and this is from a government that constantly talks about accountability. We are going to hand over huge sums of money without there being any accountability to the Canadian public.

It is ironic that we are cancelling the court challenges program which allowed charter challenges to ensure equality rights in Canada were protected while we hand over this money that has no accountability attached to it and it is going to really impact on our industry here in Canada.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

Mr. Speaker, I rise again on the issue of softwood lumber and the agreement that is being pursued by the Conservative government that will leave our industry far short in the future.

It was very interesting to hear the Minister of Natural Resources speak today in the House and admit that the industry was now going to have to be restructured. Quite rightly, if this agreement is carried through, it will create fewer jobs in the industry and more exports of raw material to the United States.

The fact that this agreement has no tariff on raw logs will drive the destruction of our sawmill and related products industry across the country. This is especially so in British Columbia where the value of the logs is so high and the opportunity to export them is so strong.

Despite being right on this issue and supported by every tribunal ruling on softwood, we are going to lay down to the United States on this. This is not good. This sets a bad precedent. Once we give in on this issue, we can be sure that the United States will be back again on another issue. The U.S. does not recognize weakness, it recognizes strength. Here we are acting in a fashion that is weak, that is insipid and that does not nearly stand up the way we should.

It is so ironic that in this House the Conservative government has berated our leader for cutting and running in Afghanistan, yet at home we see the same Conservative government cutting and running on this issue. I find that to be logically inconsistent and much like the rest of the government's debate on this issue.

This deal declares open season on any Canadian industry that the U.S. wants to target with illegal tariffs. The U.S. knows that it will be rewarded. The Conservatives are as bad as the Liberals were in caving in to American interests. I remember when the Liberals came to power in the early 1990s they said that they were not going to go along with NAFTA. What did the Liberals do as soon as they were elected to power? They went along with it. They definitely went along with it. The Liberals went along with a lot of those types of arrangements which for instance are now driving our energy industry and which are harmful in the long term to our economy.

NAFTA has reinforced inequalities of power across North America and has entrenched an economic model of integration that has resulted in a growing gap between the rich and the poor in North America.

This Harper-Bush sellout of our lumber industry is just the beginning.