Yes, I am, Mr. Chair.
I'm still getting over that last vote. I'm appalled, as any Canadian listening in would be, that due care and attention is not being brought to this bill. What we have just done to independent lumber remanufacturers in British Columbia is absolutely appalling. I have not seen anything this egregious in my brief time here on Parliament Hill. It just makes no sense.
I now move on to the motion itself. Here, as elsewhere in the many dozens of clauses that we'll be examining over the next day or two, Mr. Chair.... Unless somebody in this committee votes to reconsider these appallingly bad rules of order to ramrod this stuff through, no matter what the consequences, we've seen so far, at least in three areas, that we have provoked some very egregious consequences.
Here, in clause 13, what we have is replacing “The amount of the charge applicable to an export of a softwood lumber product from a region during a month is increased by 50%”. That's how subclause 13(1) currently reads. We would be reducing that to 0.5%, so that what we would have is a penalty, but a penalty that is not a straitjacket for the softwood companies.
We've seen here that what we have done so far is penalize lumber manufacturers. We've given away our ability to deal effectively on arm's-length transactions, and accepted holus-bolus the American interpretation of what an arm's-length transaction is and what unrelated and related persons must be. We haven't adequately defined a whole series of aspects of this bill. And we have these punitive measures that permeate this bill.
As Mr. Feldman, one of the two non-governmental witnesses that this committee allowed before it moved to ram through each and every clause of this bill, said, most of this bill consists of punitive, unfair measures levied against the softwood industry. It's a recipe for disaster. That's why we've lost nearly 4,000 jobs in the few weeks that this agreement has been in place, with closures right across the country.
There have been plant closures in Abitibi-Témiscamingue, there have been plant closures in the Saguenay—Lac-Saint-Jean, and there have been closures on the North Shore. Those closures occurred because the industry has no faith in this Agreement; it has no faith in what we are doing here. People in the industry know full well that this is not in the interests of communities.
So we have here a clause that is increasing punitive charges for companies that, through no fault of their own—in fact, it often could be the fault of another company overriding anytime—