Thank you, honourable colleague.
The agreement theoretically can be terminated in 23 months, but no trade action can be taken until three years are up. One of the reasons was that obviously we wanted to protect our industry against an immediate termination at some point by the United States that could lead to a further trade action immediately by the coalition in the United States. We wanted to buy some security from that provision.
The 12-month standstill that is part of this is important, because in the world of dumping there is an administrative risk that any export taxes that may be in place on termination would then be part of the calculation of the dumping margin for companies. In other words, they could become part of the cost base and therefore drive up the dumping margins. The standstill ensures that risk is in fact minimized.
I want to say one more thing about termination. That is that this is an agreement between two governments, and it is not an agreement that would be entered into lightly or terminated lightly. I can assure you that the United States has no interest in going back into a lumber litigation trade war, having gone through what they've gone through and we've gone through on this. The only time a softwood lumber agreement has been terminated is when Canada, not the United States, terminated the softwood lumber agreement.
I think the whole discussion around termination is a complete red herring. Virtually all international agreements—certainly all international agreements entered into by Canada and the United States—have much shorter, easier termination provisions than this agreement. That does not make them six-month agreements; it simply means there is that proviso.
As I say, in the original April 27 agreement silence does imply, by international law, a 12-month termination provision. There was enormous debate as to whether, even in the April 27 agreement, there should or should not be a termination provision. There were different points of view, and as we went through that period from April 27 to July 1, it became more broadly accepted and argued by the industry and provinces that they wanted a further termination protection, and we negotiated it, in terms that we felt were satisfactory to them.