I'm aware of that, Mr. Chair.
I like to clarify these things, even if you do punish members who ask questions of the panel or who ask questions of you for clarification. This is legislation that has enormous consequences. We've seen that in clause 6. I think it is to the shame of the committee that 11 of the 12 members did not understand what they were voting on, that essentially what we were doing is taking the legal victories that we had and turning them around into legal language that is actually a net loss for Canada.
When we go to clause 10, Mr. Chair, the NDP has been supporting for some time the Maritime exclusion. We were surprised and dismayed that in the drafting of this bill, as with the other errors that we have already seen in clause 6, an egregious error, clause 10 was very clearly a massive drafting error. There is no doubt about that, in the same way the softwood sellout was done rapidly and poorly and resulted in strong capitulation.
We see in Bill C-24 that the drafting was done so rapidly that the Maritime exclusion became a nil-level exemption. It was something that could have come back later on, because it was included within the text of Bill C-24. And because of the vagueness of the language, it could come back to bite the Maritime lumber industry significantly. So, Mr. Chair, there is no doubt that this needs to be substantially amended; it needs to be fixed.
The problem we're having as a committee, Mr. Chair, is that this is only one of a whole host of problems that exist and that the members of the lumber community want to see addressed. The problem is, Mr. Chair, as a committee we're not hearing from any of those. We've had one day of witnesses, and once those witnesses started to raise these serious concerns, the committee shut down any possibility of having other interventions. Again this morning, with the first nations, shut them down. We don't want to hear from them.
The Maritime lumber exclusion is only one of a host of problems with Bill C-24.