Thank you very much.
Recently, we had the first, if you like, organizational meetings of the binational committee, which is a government-to-government, state-to-state committee to oversee the implementation and the administration of the softwood lumber agreement and to deal with issues that arise under it.
A whole range of issues was talked about at that first meeting. Some of those issues were to be talked about further, like commitments made at the time of the agreement. We committed, for example, to beginning to have further discussions and consultations on the operating rules and the way we in fact operationalize the agreement. We also committed to looking at the log export issue, which was a big issue from a British Columbia perspective, so we struck a committee to look specifically at that.
In the time since we entered into the agreement, as you know, a couple of provinces—Quebec and Ontario in particular, although there are a few other little issues bubbling out there—put in place programs of initiative to support their lumber industry. We consulted or were consulted with by the provinces on the policies they were proposing to put in place. We had a very good discussion beforehand, and we gave some notice to the Americans that these policies were going to be put in place.
There are a number of areas where the United States has concerns that some of these policies go beyond what were agreed to be the permissible policies under the agreement, so there's discussion going on right now on a variety of policy initiatives put in place by Quebec and by Ontario, as well as on one or two other issues.
At this stage, it's really a matter of consulting, exchanging information, and trying to understand whether these policies constitute a specific circumvention of the agreement by, in effect, implementing a subsidy to the industry, which we have of course agreed we would not do under the agreement.