First of all, for the steel industry, if you look at the submission we've done, you'll see that currently we have 22,000 steelworkers working directly in the industry, and the industry affects in excess of 100,000. You can go back to the late seventies and the early eighties when they talked about the steel market across the country. Canada has stepped up to the plate. We've stepped up to the plate environmentally. We've modernized. We've done the skills training. It's now one of the top efficient lines.
U.S. Steel is not one of my favourite topics because of the facts on the way they were brought into Canada. There was not a net benefit to Canada. There have been some accusations over the shifting, and probably there's some truth to that fact, but we can't get ahold of that private agreement. There's that security agreement that the government won't let us access. That's still tied up in the courts.
Look at the companies that we deal with today. We have relationships throughout them. Look at Essar. Look at some of these others. We have a tremendous amount of them. We have great mills. We have great workforces. We're state of the art. There's no reason why we can't.... These laws have been outdated for years. I always look at this very simply, as a working person. If you look at the steel industry in regard to dumping, you'll see that it didn't happen yesterday. We've had this time and time again. That's why we had the bankruptcies. Why still today in this country are we building a bridge in Montreal with foreign steel? Why are we building a bridge in British Columbia with foreign steel?
On softwood lumber, I shake my head. We've lost 54 mills since the last agreement. Why are we still cutting the logs, shipping them and floating them down to the U.S., putting them on a ship, sending them over to China, and then bringing them back as a desk, or a chair, or whatever the case may be?
It's simple to me.