Perhaps I could start, please.
On Gordon Ritchie and the memorandum of understanding, this is a long file. I started doing this in 1982. Gordon Ritchie and I have been at this a long time, as have several others.
The original Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement specifically excluded lumber as a freely traded item. We wonder sometimes whether or not lumber has ever been freely traded, given the disputatious nature from 1789 and from Aroostook, all the way through. Dispute settlement was our hope; it was our promise; it was the thing that our colleague, Ambassador Wilson, did wring out of the United States at the eleventh hour within NAFTA, so that the dispute resolution mechanisms there, under the two various chapters, would be to the benefit of settling a dispute. It appears in the context of today that they don't work particularly well if you give up on them when you get near the end.
Will the new settlement dispute resolution mechanism work better in the context simply of softwood lumber? Pardon me, but I'm from Hearst, and you've got to prove it to me.
On the matter of meritorious initiatives in consultation with Canada, can I volunteer, please, to have my name put forward with a list of those people who will sit and have a look at what the things are? I would very much like to know what those things are before they're actually commissioned. Our fear is that while something can be cast as a meritorious initiative because you've rebuilt something in a stricken area like New Orleans, it will have gone through an awful lot of political hands to get to that point.
Thank you for the time.