We listen to everyone on every study—whether you're an independent producer like you, or you're small producer with 10 employees, or with 200 or 2,000, or as Linamar is, with $7 billion in sales and 7,000 employees.
When it comes to softwood lumber, we have been fighting. If you recall, the Prime Minister brought this up at his first meeting with President Obama, and the President didn't even know there was a dispute. That's how small it is to them, but how big it is to us. I've been told that this has been talked about at every subsequent meeting between President Trump and our Prime Minister, but you know the politics of how these countervailing duties are put in place. They grind you and they hold you to it.
I think the best that Canada can do, unless you have suggestions otherwise, is to go to the places we can to challenge them. We've been successful. I have a steel fabricating company in my riding with 100 employees who fabricate American steel in Canada and then ship it back for building in the U.S. They were slapped with a 7% tariff three weeks ago. We won at the U.S. commerce board.
Unfortunately, these are the challenges we have to deal with in this kind of trade environment, but the good thing is that Canada usually is successful at the end of the day, and that's what I'm believing. That's why you've survived in the past, even though your piggy bank got pretty slim at certain times, but we hope we'll be successful again.
Mr. Schiller, how do you think we'll be able to amend something very quickly? I don't think it's plausible to put it in this. Maybe what you're asking for is that we push the Americans harder to get an agreement. That might be something, but we will not be able to use this. I don't know how that would be able to be done in a tri-party deal.