Well, actually, we communicate to members by listening to their concerns. Their concerns are about the future. You talk about stability and communicating stability. Well, we talk about that all the time. We want the communities in which our members work and live to remain active, to remain open. Most of these mill towns are single-industry towns, so they depend on the forest resources to maintain the community.
What we'd like to see are the things that have been said around this table. I like some of the things I've heard; some of the things I haven't liked. The one thing that has been communicated pretty clearly is that if we allow this deal to go ahead as it's made up right now, it won't provide us with the stability that you're talking about. It may provide us with some short-term benefits, but it's not clear what we're going to have. If we allow the Americans to dictate to us about access to their market--and I've heard different speakers talk about this--there's a disregard that American legislators have for our sovereign rights, which we've negotiated as part of a deal.
Our members have every right to expect that the moneys that were imposed illegally, and have been found in every realm so far to be imposed illegally, should be returned in total to those communities. You say, “Well, we'll just give them $1 billion”, but it seems to me that $1 billion in these communities would go a long way to providing better conditions for people who are being jeopardized by the same exports of raw logs or the duties imposed that prevent their mills from being run.
The second part of that is that we have a real concern about the $4 billion that's coming back to the industry. What we want is some kind of guarantee from those companies that the $4 billion or a portion of it will be reinvested in the Canadian forest industry. As you said, our goal is the same as yours: we want to make sure there's a survival into the future.
If you look at how the Americans ignored us, if you take that one aspect.... The Americans are ignoring our wins, whether under the NAFTA panel or at the WTO. They've ignored them and they keep ignoring them, because they're hoping they'll frustrate us by waiting us out. What we're saying is that we don't think it's worth giving up when we're so close to the end.
Now, I've heard some people say that even if we win this, the next week or the next day the American coalition may put in another brief. What we have to go forward with is that we're right. And it's for the future, because if we give up now, when we try to exercise our rights in the next NAFTA.... If the government agrees to this deal, and if, God forbid, in seven years' time the coalition puts in another challenge, or if even before then it puts in another challenge--