I just have had very clear confirmation, Mr. Chair, of why this process is not working. We've had two interventions, from the Conservative Party and from the Bloc, who seemingly are completely unaware of the capitulation that is made by referring to clause 6 in this manner.
What we are doing is saying that regardless of whether or not they treat each other at arm's length, the related persons are deemed not to deal with each other at arm's length. This is something that has been a major issue in British Columbia, and yet we've had an amendment that was important and endorsed by many of the lumber industry in British Columbia, because of their concerns that this definition is the United States' definition of arm's-length transaction rather than the Canadian definition, thrown aside without any due consideration.
We've been dealing for five and a half hours with this bill. This is the first major case where we have a major capitulation that the government is refusing to bend on.
It is a definition that has consequences, Mr. Chair—enormous consequences, because what we're doing is throwing away our legal victories. We fought for this principle at the WTO; we fought for it at NAFTA. Now, in subclauses 6(1) and 6(2), what we are doing, essentially, is throwing away those legal victories.
Mr. Chair, there is no more potent and visible example of why this process of ramrodding through this entire bill in the course of a day does not make sense than this one in clause 6, where, after years of legal victory at the WTO—and the Liberals should know this, because they were in government at the time—and at NAFTA, we are simply, in the course of a few minutes, throwing all that away and putting into legislation a definition that now confirms what the coalition has been saying all along about Canadian companies: that it doesn't matter if you've been treating that related person at arm's length; what it means now is, according to the Canadian government, full capitulation—we'll simply take the American definition.
This has consequences not only for this bill. It's not at all clear whether this bill will even go through, as the deal falls apart. Only 25% of the companies have signed on. That tells you something, Mr. Chair: this badly botched bill is going down. But if we adopt this in legislation, you can bet your bottom dollar, Mr. Chair, the coalition will be coming back and pointing to this—this work done at 10:20 in the morning on a Tuesday, as we ramrod through Bill C-24—and they'll be pointing to it as an example that Canada accepts the American definition of what constitutes arm's-length transaction.
So here we have parties all uniting to sell out Canada's interest--