Mr. Speaker, this adjournment debate arises from a question I asked a few weeks ago before President Biden's visit. I mentioned that just days after the Prime Minister met with President Biden in 2021, the U.S. announced it was doubling the duties on softwood lumber and that workers in communities that rely on the Canadian forest industry were hoping for better this time.
My first question is whether the Prime Minister brought up softwood lumber with the President, and I ask that because I have heard conflicting news on this front. It seems that if the word softwood was mentioned in those meetings, it was just a passing thought and certainly not a priority at all. It should be one of the government's highest priorities when it comes to international trade.
I was in Prince George last week at the annual conference of the Council of Forest Industries, and the mood was rather sombre. The forest industry in British Columbia and across the country is facing very difficult times. Wildfires, beetle epidemics and years of old-growth harvest have reduced the amount of economically available timber. Low lumber prices have closed mills across Canada, including the Vaagen mill in the town of Midway in my riding. On top of that, we have illegal tariffs that have taken billions of dollars from the Canadian forest industry. It does not look like it will get better anytime soon.
While in Prince George, I talked to the Canadian negotiators from Global Affairs. I talked to industry representatives. They pointed out that the unfair anti-dumping fines levied by the Americans have the insidious property of becoming larger when lumber prices are low and smaller when prices are high. Canadian lumber exporters were surviving during the times of high prices last year and the year before, but now that prices are low, they are facing the double hit of prices that often do not even support the cost of production as well as high export tariffs being levied in the near future.
I will add that there is a way to ameliorate this situation while the illegal tariffs are in place. It is to provide supports to grow the mass timber sector so we can develop domestic markets as well as export wood products to the United States without having to pay softwood lumber tariffs.
That is just what my private member's bill, Bill S-222, would do. It would encourage the federal government to use mass timber and other building materials with low environmental impact while building federal infrastructure. Two operations in my riding, Structurlam in the South Okanagan and Kalesnikoff in West Kootenay, are leaders in the mass timber sector in North America, and we should support them and other value-added plants across the country so that when we are harvesting trees from a shrinking available cut, we are getting more money and more jobs from each and every tree.
Yes, there are ways we can support the Canadian forest industry, but the biggest win would be the elimination of the unfair and illegal tariffs the Americans have put on our exports to the U.S.A. We must keep up the pressure on the American government to get rid of these measures. We must continually make the case to the American people that these unfair tariffs benefit only a few wealthy American timber barons and hit the American public with significantly higher building costs.
Is the Canadian government putting sustained pressure on the Americans to fix this?
