Mr. Chair, my colleague, Mr. Scissorhands, has never seen a motion he hasn't wanted to cut into pieces. He's cutting out the most essential parts of this motion. I simply don't buy the arguments that he's using to raise this. He is essentially saying that after Mr. Cardin gave us basically about a week's notice to look into this.... We were all supposed to do our homework. We may have had some questions, as Mr. Maloney did, following that. It's normal to bring those to committee. But we all had the opportunity to look into this and to ask questions of Mr. Cardin. So to cut out all those essential trade measures makes absolutely no sense. It's gutting the motion.
I have to say, I'm pretty appalled, Mr. Chair. What we have is a Conservative government that last year put in place, on October 12, the softwood sellout. The softwood industry basically blew up, exploded after that; 10,000 jobs were lost as a direct result of imposing those punitive tariffs at the border. The government was well aware of the consequences of that, even though we had won. We had won in the U.S. Court of International Trade, so we had passed that final step. What the government had was four aces, and they folded, and gave away all of the money, a billion bucks, and 10,000 jobs.
So now we have Mr. Cardin bringing a motion forward to address that, and we have my colleague, Mr. Scissorhands—Mr. Pallister—saying about the people who are unemployed, the 200 families losing a breadwinner every day, that it's somehow their fault they're unemployed, that somehow Mr. Cardin is showing disrespect by identifying this problem and wanting to take action.
If I were a partisan person, Mr. Chair, I would be taking those blues and going through the Conservative comments. There are lots of juicy little quotes that in British Columbia would turn people absolutely ballistic that the government would say such things—that this motion is a waste of time, that it's the people's own fault that they're unemployed—when it is the government that put the softwood sellout into effect.
So, no, I'm certainly not voting for this amendment. I think it's silly. It certainly wastes some time of the committee, and it cuts out some of the most essential parts of the recommendations, including the fact that this committee is recommending these measures to the House, so in Parliament we can have this debate, where it should be held.