Thank you.
I would like to thank the minister for coming before this committee. I'm replacing Peter Julian today.
I have a couple of questions about softwood, NAFTA, and free trade. In your opening remarks you talked about a lot of jobs being created and a good climate, but also the effects of the Canadian dollar.
I'm from Vancouver Island north and represent people from forest industry towns. A lot of jobs have unfortunately been lost due to raw log exports. Mill jobs have been lost because of the impacts from the softwood lumber dispute. The rising dollar is also impacting some of our kraft paper mills. They're seeing the effects of that. That's just to give you a bit of sense of where I come from.
On the softwood lumber issue, I see that an independent arbitrator from London, England, has been named. Is that in this budget? Is that person who was named in the agreement? Are those costs projected in this budget? How often would we expect that person to be used, if that's the case? We're just hearing these things. Is there a budget assigned? Why would we have an independent arbitrator if we already have a dispute resolution mechanism under the free trade agreement?
We're also hearing rumblings in B.C. about an alternate version of the deal that the Americans have presented to their government. If that's true, how do we reconcile that? Will there be extra costs in the negotiations of that deal? Will that increase the timelines for the settlement process? What will the financial impacts of that be?
On free trade, you also talked a lot about how NAFTA is not perfect--and we've always known that. I think negotiations have been started to resolve some of the issues there. But when you talk about looking at all areas of public policy under trade agreements, will you commit to looking more at fair trade agreements? Will you have witnesses come in to explore some of the processes under fair trade rules that will be beneficial to the economies in other countries where we have trade dealings, and are also better for the environment and the economy? We've seen a lot of success with fair trade goods. It's in the public mindset, and I think it's something this government needs to explore.
Thank you.