To start off, just to put things in perspective, basically, as I said, the lumber mills in the Prince George region of course will run flat out to clear out the beetle wood. When you look at a situation like a Canfor that is going to run it's lowest-cost wood, then clearly you're going to shut down those lumber mills in the southeast quadrant. What happens then is that it'll put some of the pulp mills in danger, whether it be the Kamloops mill, whether it be the Celgar mill, and then that supply comes into question. That would be the first thing. Another point is to ask whether those mills, even though they are relatively low cost versus the east, can pay a 15% export tax during, shall we say, a price war environment. The answer is no, they can't. That would be one area.
In terms of northern Ontario, in terms of lumber mills and so on, I haven't looked at a number, meaning how many mills or how much gets knocked down. I look at it from the point of view of housing starts, and we've gone over two million, but as we all know, interest rates have run up, and obviously we're on the downside of the cycle and we see that in the pricing, which has been brought out today. To my mind, if you're reduced to a 30% market share, and let's say you were running at 34%, okay, you're going to lose a chunk there. If the U.S. housing starts themselves go down to 25%, then you can see that it's a multiplicative impact. That's what I would see happening. Certainly the same thing would apply to Quebec.
Very quickly, on raw logs, really what happens there is this. Let's say you're paying a duty--pick a number again, 15% or 5% or whatever it is. If you can bring in the log without any duty to the United States, then of course it makes sense to put the lumber mill there and create jobs south of the border.
