The first thing we want is to recover the money that has been unfairly paid.
I am going to tell you about the situation in our border mills, which essentially process logs from American forests. We are the biggest buyer in Quebec from private softwood forests. We will recall that the first arguments made by the US Lumber Coalition and the government were that since public forests were managed by the provinces, they were subsidized. When mills are supplied from private forests, the tax should not have to be paid and there should be full reimbursement.
The second thing we want is to have fair trade.
While we are paying high taxes, the Europeans have developed their timber sector and taken a bit of our market share, mainly in the southern United States. In addition, they have no tax or other constraint. To our mind, this makes no sense.
As I explained earlier, we are a family business that has been in operation for over 60 years. We have been exporting to the United States for 50 years. We are on our American friends' doorstep. It makes no sense for us not to be able to export our products to the United States.
From the Americans' point of view, the fear clearly arises from this desire to protect their market share. As my colleague explained, the American producers have profited from the crisis they provoked in order to expand their industry, particularly in the southern United States. As we understand it, that expansion is winding down, since there are fewer logs and raw materials left to process.
In our opinion, we could think about a way to limit our exports, one way or another, using quotas or taxes, or maybe using a hybrid formula that incorporated both, to assure the Americans that we will not hurt the American market when demand is low.