Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thanks to each of you for coming forward today with excellent presentations.
I will say, Mr. Shepherd and Mr. Perkins, you put your points eloquently, but you represent a minority of the industry. Aside from the Maritime Lumber Bureau—for obvious reasons involving the maintenance of the maritime lumber exemption—we've had only three presentations from industry that have unreservedly supported the agreement. The majority of the industry is very legitimately concerned about the contents of this agreement.
Though you put your case eloquently, to say that this agreement would mean we would never endure a softwood war again I don't find very credible. In fact, given that we are going over the last two hurdles of litigation—and we know these are the last two hurdles, because they're not appealable— I think that giving $500 million to the coalition actually increases the opportunity for a war to come back at us, because the funds will be there, the oxygen will be there, ironically, for the American industry to come back and fight the Canadian industry.
More specifically, I'd like to get to some questions. Mr. Van Bergeyk had an excellent presentation. The first point I'd like to touch on is the issue of raw log exports. It's a big issue in British Columbia. We're seeing logs leaving our province and going to the United States. That's where the jobs are ending up.
You mentioned in your presentation that even though you're primary producers, you add value and manufacture custom products, and that you're concerned about the impact of this proposed agreement on that value-added manufacturing. Could you expand a bit on that and on the danger you see that this deal, as many have said, would actually encourage raw log exports--in other words, continue that reduction in jobs that has critically hit softwood communities across the country?