You are describing a problem that is very serious in British Columbia and in the rest of Canada. We are talking about the future of the forestry industry.
If I may, I will answer in English. My softwood lumber vocabulary is somewhat limited.
I'm a former trade negotiator, and like everybody who has worked on trade policy in Canada, I've had my share of softwood lumber losses in the past.
In fact, just this morning I met with one of my colleagues at Global Affairs Canada, who is responsible for the softwood lumber file. It's fair to say that, with the way things are headed now, the expiry of the softwood lumber agreement is likely to lead to another round of countervailing and anti-dumping duties. That will have an impact on the forest sector, which will come on top of the impact of the mountain pine beetle infestation. If you overlay those two things in British Columbia, you have pretty serious impact for a lot of communities in the north.
My colleague Martin was recently in Quesnel, B.C., which is one of the communities that is really heavily forest dependent. He was there as a federal representative to a provincial government effort to help the community of Quesnel adapt and think about opportunities it will have as a community going forward, given the severe impact already of the decline in availability of fibre supply, as they call it, the annual allowable cut, or AAC.
The province will be declining drastically in that region. The products that it's able to export and the jobs associated with that are really at risk. The situation with the softwood lumber agreement will only come on top of that.
It's worth noting that in the past the federal government has allotted some serious consideration and resources to something called the community adjustment initiative. WD was given responsibility for administering that initiative, so it's at least conceivable that, unfortunately, we'll be in that same situation with the likely initiation of trade remedy actions in the United States over the next few weeks and months.