I appreciate these little gifts of five and six seconds you're giving me as well, Mr. Chair, despite the closure, although overall, with the five or six seconds and with what you've taken away for asking committee witnesses, I still come out behind.
Mr. Chair, this is a pretty fundamental issue. We have companies that paid twice. We don't know how many. We don't know for how many days. We don't know, when we look at the Washington border crossings, the Minnesota border crossings, and the New York State border crossings, to what extent and where those double payments were made. But if we set it at October 11 and we don't have a precise hour--which will add further legal difficulties, there's no doubt about that--what we are doing is imposing that double tax in a way that is not to the benefit or the advantage of all the companies that have suffered from this botched agreement and this botched bill. We know that companies paid twice. We know that. We don't have the final comprehensive list, because the government didn't have its act together and didn't do the kind of tracking it should have done as this agreement was forced into place.
Mr. Chair, the end result is that companies paid twice. By saying that the duty payments are in effect as of October 11, we are enshrining that double payment for those companies in what I think is an extremely irresponsible way. Mr. Chair, we're forcing them to pay twice. They paid the 10.8% illegal American tariff that was removed by the Court of International Trade as of October 13, and we've seen, as I mentioned last Friday, that Customs and Border Protection is now paying out 100% dollars to Canadian companies that have not filed with the government. So we have the companies that stayed away from the government now getting those 100% dollars, and we have the companies that signed onto EDC having a double tax, which actually means that they'll be getting about 67¢ back. It's absolutely bizarre and irresponsible, Mr. Chair.
Now on top of that double tax that we're imposing through clause 18, we're also looking to impose a double charge: the illegal American tariffs and the 15% self-imposed Conservative capitulation tariffs. We're looking at egregiously poor treatment of softwood companies.
October 11 cannot be the date. I cannot speak in favour of this, because it is absolutely irresponsible. It was irresponsible of the government to impose this. It's irresponsible of the government to set this date.