Thank you for clarifying that. This is an issue of the giveaway that does not need to happen. It is a giveaway that, because of the government's botching of this particular agreement, taxpayers will have to pick up. Essentially we have a situation in which only 25% of companies have signed on to this badly botched deal. It's incredible, Mr. Chair. And yet we are penalizing them for reference prices. We are penalizing them at the border. We are imposing export taxes that mean lost jobs and value-added production, not in Canada but in the United States.
Every single clause here, as it stands, means lost jobs: in northern British Columbia; in the interior and on the coast of B.C.; in northern Alberta; in northern Saskatchewan; as we've seen with the closures that have occurred already, in northern Manitoba, where I'll be going next week to speak to softwood workers; in northern Ontario, where I was last week speaking to softwood workers in softwood communities, as well as to the mayor of Thunder Bay, about the implications of this atrociously bad bill, the result of an incredibly botched negotiation.
People in Northern Quebec, the Abitibi, the Saguenay—Lac-Saint-Jean region and on the North Shore have lost jobs because of this Agreement. The Government of Quebec cannot intervene. If it did, anti-circumvention provisions would mean that it would be sued by the Coalition.
Here we have an amendment that would allow us to reduce all the costs, the tariffs that are being levied against our softwood lumber industry. If members vote in favour of this amendment, we will save the jobs that we are currently losing in Northern Quebec, in Ontario and British Columbia, as well as across the Prairies — in Saskatchewan. for example. Job losses due to this Agreement are considerable.
Mr. Chairman, we have a responsibility to take action and put an end to the government's irresponsible behaviour. It seeks to impose a tariff on our own industry which is worse than the illegal tariff. That one was 10.8 per cent. Now we're talking about a 15 per cent tariff. It's absolutely disgusting.