Thank you.
Thank you all for your comments today. Ms. Campbell talked about our advocacy with the U.S. Obviously, as a trade committee, we've seen not only multiple stakeholders in the U.S., but also our counterparts there. The Steel Caucus, which Terry and I are members of, has visited there as well.
We have been making that effort, but I would like to propose to the committee that we send a letter to our U.S. counterpart, once again imploring them to remove the tariffs and to let them know that our position remains unchanged and that we would like to work with them in any way possible to achieve that outcome. I think that is a way that we as a committee can support to contact our direct counterpart in the U.S. I'll put that out as a proposal for the committee to discuss, to advocate for that removal.
The second thing is that there are a lot of small and medium-sized businesses that can't navigate the website. We heard from one this week, actually on Tuesday, who said they don't even have a person. They don't have the people power to allocate resources to say, “Okay, you go and investigate how we access these reliefs”. So we really need to critically address the SME situation. Forty-two thousand SMEs in Canada need help. That's where the opportunity really lies, I think, in terms of our future trade across the globe. I think that's something we really need to address. We've heard that over and over at this committee, regardless of what topic we're discussing.
The question I have, when we talk about those who are being impacted, is about the secondary list. This secondary list, which was created in an attempt to put some pressure on the U.S., is not working. It's not being very effective, from our perspective. We left the table at USMCA without getting these tariffs removed. We have a lot of people writing to the committee, such as boat manufacturers, and appliance retailers, who are being very adversely impacted and who feel they have no place in this fight that's happening right now, being on that secondary list.
I'm not sure how effective that secondary list is being, other than at killing Canadian businesses that are on that list because they are now subject to these tariffs. What I want to ask you is what you have heard from these groups, and, regarding this secondary list, what is being done to help them in the struggle they are now facing with this one-way tariff that is on?