Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Despite the fact that I disagree with a lot of your rulings, you are on your toes as well today, though I would appreciate a little more respect for the time allocation.
Coming back to this in clause 10, it is an amendment of the initial date that is contained within the softwood agreement and in Bill C-24. What we have right now, Mr. Chair, is a date set at September 30, 2006. There is no doubt that this date has to be changed. What is the logical date that would need to be put in that is not going to be harmful to softwood communities across the country?
Mr. Chair, what has indeed happened, as we saw with the incredible confusion around mid-October, is that the AD and CV duties continued to be collected at the border in the United States past the “put into effect” date of the softwood lumber agreement.
Even though we have not adopted this legislation, it's important for folks to note that this government has just rammed in a deal, even though it's unravelling as we speak. The reality is that this was imposed when the date for the actual putting into effect of the agreement came. There were two duties being levied, and depending on whom you speak to, that continued for a number of days. As you know, we raised these questions at the committee hearings when the government officials were here, to find out exactly what the last date was that the illegal AD and CV duties were collected. We do not know at this point when those double duty collections actually ended, Mr. Chair.
Because of that, and because of the incredible strain that softwood companies have been under, what we need to do is set a date that actually respects their ability to work through the process, their ability as companies to try to right the wrongs of this egregiously bad agreement. The date that makes sense is the end of October.
To this day, we don't know exactly when the AD and CV duty collection ended. We do know when the duty collection started for these self-imposed penalties that are actually higher than the illegal American tariffs. We went from a 10.8% tariff to a 15% tariff overnight, Mr. Chair, and we saw what the results of that were: thousands of lost jobs.
In Abitibi-Témiscamingue, the Saguenay—Lac-Saint-Jean regions, and on the North Shore, some 1,700 jobs have been lost in one week alone. Across the country, 4,000 jobs have been lost since this Agreement came into effect.
This disastrous result is due to the badly botched...