Of course, there was no appetite from the Liberal Party to do that.
This will pass, and I want to make sure that you understand that we are not going to vote against it. That being said—and you would understand this too—Trump got elected by the Rust Belt states that felt neglected, that weren't included or thought about after the last NAFTA agreement, and I don't want to make that same mistake. We've had some 200 submissions to appear in front of this committee, and we were proposing March 5 to have it out of committee, which would have been during the break week, which means it would have hit the House at exactly the same time it will right now. The Liberal Party said no, and I can see why, because as we start to go through it, we start to see the economic analysis that the C.D. Howe Institute did. It said it will be a $10-billion hit for Canada. If you compare it to TPP, if we had all signed on as Obama wanted us to, it would have been a $4-billion plus. So there's lots to absorb.
When you're looking at this $10-billion hit, there are a lot of groups and organizations and companies that are negatively impacted. I'm not going to vote against it and they understand that, but they at least want a mitigation plan. They want to understand what it means for them and how the government is going to help them, and that's all we're trying to do here. So we will get through this, and I hope we will be in clause-by-clause by Thursday and it will be back into the House and then hopefully the Senate. Now, I can't control the Senate. That's a different can of worms, and good luck there.
One of the things we talked about before was the de minimis and the changes to the de minimis, going from $20 to $40. I know you probably wanted it to be $800, but it's not there. Then there's the tax-free status to $150, but a lot of people don't understand that Canada Post, which is the biggest carrier here in Canada, is not included in that.
Do you have any thoughts on that and why Canada Post wouldn't have been included and only private couriers were included in that scenario?