You're going to lose customers, absolutely, and when you lose customers, that means you lay people off. When you lay people off, then you're ordering less steel, which means our steel companies are going to feel that impact too. So you start to see the domino effect of the layoffs moving through.
One of the things I find frustrating is that the issues we're facing here, with China dumping steel, have been here for a while, and the U.S. asked us to help them. We could have said, “You're right, Mr. Ross; we need to deal with this”, and we probably wouldn't be here today. We'd be like Australia, exempted without a quota, if we had done that, but we haven't, so this is the scenario we're in today.
I look at it in a couple of ways. From a consumer point of view, we can say that if we bring in a counter-tariff, my manufacturers on the Prairies, Bourgault and companies like that, will start paying a lot more for their steel. Their customers are farmers. We were at a farm product show last week and they were saying things like, “I think I'm going to keep my drill.” Already it's having impacts. The domino effect is already starting to happen. Where does that come back to? It's into the steel sector here in Canada.
How do you deal with that? How do you move forward? There has to be a way to still make the U.S. respect us and still say there is going to be an impact from their decision to put a tariff on without having this whole pile of domino effects. The Canadian Labour Congress talked about employees and all that. All that would be great if the cupboards weren't bare, but we have a government that has spent crazily for the last two years and now we have to find revenues in order to do those types of things, so where does that revenue come from?
I like your idea about the countervails. If we're going to do that 25% on some $16 billion, there might be $2 billion, $3 billion, or $4 billion coming into the coffers. It shouldn't go to general revenue; it should come back to the people who are impacted the most.
Mr. Young, I'm just kind of curious. If this were to go on for six or eight months—we have mid-terms in play right now—what would your business look like in November or December?